


Fossils

by Chairtastic



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Abuse, Alien Abduction, Alien Cultural Differences, Alternate Universe, Anthropology, F/F, F/M, Fridge Horror, Grief/Mourning, Humans are special, Kidnapping, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Powered by Dead People, Psychological Horror, Singing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-16
Updated: 2019-10-16
Packaged: 2020-12-17 14:56:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 16
Words: 55,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21056279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chairtastic/pseuds/Chairtastic
Summary: Fossilization is the process by which organic structures are replaced with minerals.  While often the case, the process doesn't require the organic to be dead.





	1. Chapter 1

As of me writing this, I have only Mobile data internet. Expect updates across the board to be slow at best.

Summary: Fossilization is the process by which organic structures are replaced by minerals, typically silica. While typically true, the process doesn't require the organic to have died to be completed.

**Fossils -- Chapter One, A toy for Blue Diamond**

The first time Blue Diamond had come to Pink’s zoo, she had cried so much, she could barely function. It had been all she could do to place a loyal and decorated agate in charge of the facility to get things functioning again. But her duties required her to leave, eventually.

The second time Blue Diamond had come to Pink’s zoo was to an extensive list of repairs, upgrades, and clarifications that needed to be authorized by her since resources were precious until she or Yellow could secure a new colony. White’s new colony would provide a buffer, but it was a stop-gap measure. Blue Diamond, eager to be alone to mourn, authorized the agate to requisition everything she needed. The zoo would come second only to Blue’s next colony in terms of resource priority.

In the time between her second and third visits to the zoo, she had reports of questionable materials shipped to the zoo. Specifically, the shards of shattered gems which had not been requisitioned by Yellow for her experiments. While worrying, her Pearl confirmed via the agate that the shards were necessary for the zoo’s overall mission. Then there came a pressing need for more humans for the zoo – some catastrophe had reduced their total population below the viable self-sustaining threshold. Roaming Eyes were assigned to the zoo pursuant to human capture efforts.

She waited a thousand years or so before she returned to the zoo, and when she did she found her agate commander ecstatic with news. Blue Diamond had never heard an agate so excited before. An audience was requested and approved.

–

Holly-Blue Agate checked herself in the reflective surface of one of the exterior viewing windows. Her banded hair buns were perfect, her cape of office was immaculate, and to her eyes the commanding presence an agate should possess – fearsome, in-control, a hair’s breadth from apocalyptic fury – was in place. A shame the pink lights in the audience section of the facility discolored her skin so, she looked almost purple – like those wretched amethysts!

Four of those Earth-grown clods were stationed around the specialty humans bred per Pink Diamond’s operational plan. Quartz soldiers, big and as strong as Holly-Blue but of a more rambunctious disposition. Before Pink Diamond’s secret purpose for the zoo had been discovered, it had taken all her patience to deal with them.

But it would be worth it, Holly-Blue told herself as she took up her position and marched the formation down to the audience chamber. To see Blue Diamond’s face light up when Pink’s dream had been fulfilled! The humans were more well-behaved than the amethysts, honestly. Holly-Blue didn’t have to worry about them.

The Diamond’s audience chamber was utterly massive – the entire pinnacle of the station was required to house gems of such majesty and literal size as the diamonds. Pink Diamond had envisioned all four diamonds at once in the room, and had allocated space accordingly. It was lined with pink pillars twisted in organic shapes per Pink’s design aesthetic, which all worked toward the viewing windows which had the diamond’s reclining cushion nearby. The ceiling was positively covered in bubbled gems – rose quartzes, Pink’s daring first original gem type which unfortunately turned traitor. Blue Diamond mercifully bound them forever, rather than shatter them.

Per protocol, Holly-Blue and her accompaniment stopped on the insignia of the Diamond Authority per Era One, and saluted. Once she had saluted, Holly-Blue bowed at the waist and began the official greetings. “My diamond,” she spoke lovingly, “my lustrous, gleaming, perfectly perfect diamond.”

Holly-Blue looked at her when she stood up from her bow. A shawl and dress of deep navy, skin as blue as Holly-Blue’s own white hair that perfectly framed Blue Diamond’s gem in her torso, and an imperious expression on her regal face. Nearby her waify and demure pearl stood ready to obey her diamond’s orders. “You may proceed,” Blue Diamond commanded in her whisper voice. “Hasten to explain why these humans are outside of the containment unit.”

“Three thousand years ago, when this facility was first created, it functioned purely as a zoo. The containment and furtherance of an oddity among organic life.” Holly-Blue had practiced her speech literally thousands of times, there was nothing that could shake her from its delivery. “But Pink Diamond saw something more. She saw an avenue for an entirely new category of gem production!” Holly-Blue clapped her hands twice, and the amethyst guards moved out of formation to line up without breaking their salute.

Three adult human specimens remained in their formation, with their hands arranged in the diamond salute. They were presented in the standard uniform for human specimens, a blue vest, long white loincloth that wrapped from mid-chest to the waist then hung down, a brown belt, and communication earrings. The only distinction was that the humans each had a polished surface on their bodies, which caught Blue Diamond’s attention post-haste.

The magnificent gem matriarch sat up on her cushion. Even crouched as she was, she was over ten meters tall. She squinted her eyes to see the humans better, and her expression was unreadable. “What… have you done?”

This wasn’t expected, Blue was supposed to be overjoyed. Holly-Blue felt sweat creep along her brow and struggled to keep her cool. “Um. Completed Pink Diamond’s mission for the zoo, my diamond.”

Blue Diamond’s eyes, each as large as Holly-Blue Agate was tall, turned to the commander with clearly a less than stellar mood. “_What mission_?”

Holly-Blue hadn’t imagined Blue wouldn’t _know_ the mission, she’d assumed that was why Blue Diamond had bothered to keep the zoo operational. But that was fine, Holly-Blue had just done her a service in ignorance rather than met her diamond’s expectations. Holly-Blue cleared her throat and tried to regain her composure. “Pink Diamond’s note on humans indicated she wished for them to be preserved, but that her fellow diamonds – you, of course – wanted the Earth to only exist for gem life. So she looked for a way to turn humans _into_ gems.” Holly-Blue indicated the humans, and tried to smile. “We have completed that objective!”

Holly-Blue clapped her hands again, and the three humans stepped forward, then bent to show their diamond the gem that had become the core of their being.

“In lieu of actual categorization data, we have referred to them as fossils, my diamond. Organic matter that has been replaced with mineral – “

“I am _familiar_ with the meaning of the word,” Blue Diamond quietly interrupted. “Who authorized you to go ahead with these experiments? You’re an agate, not a kindergartener, or a gem theorist.”

Chastised, Holly-Blue bent at the waist in another bow. “I’m terribly sorry my diamond.” She rose again and hastily gestured to the humans. “But… you authorized my actions. Your orders were to ‘continue Pink Diamond’s efforts’, and this is one of the duties that entailed.” Holly-Blue watched in trepidation as Blue Diamond glared at her.

Eventually, her matriarch sighed and lessened her severe expression. “I did, didn’t I? Poor wording on my part. Proceed.”

“I have gathered the best of the three varieties we have been able to produce.”

A blonde female with poofy hair and fair skin was the first Holly-Blue indicated. She had a curved gem of golden-yellow which seemed to contain bubbles within it in the middle of her sternum. “Here, we have an Amber.” An androgynous dark skinned male with similarly dark hair in thick cords was the next to be indicated. His gem was above his eyes, colored orange and red that was broken up by lines of black; it looked as though his gem had been shattered and repaired. “This is an agatized bone, which we simply refer to as a Fossil.” The third was another androgynous male that was darker than the female but lighter than the other male, with poofy black hair, a peculiar curve to his upper lip, and hair which grew around his gem. His gem was striking in shape and color, lower on his chest than the female’s, such that his wrap almost covered it. A spiral-shaped gemstone that had a white background and a plethora of colors that changed as the lighting shifted. “And this is a variety of opal, we called it an Ammonite.”

Blue Diamond looked perturbed and at a loss for this development, but offered no praise or criticism. After a moment, she took a deep breath and focused her gaze again on Holly-Blue Agate. “This is what you requisitioned the gem shards for, is it?”

Holly-Blue knew she wouldn’t like _that_ line of dialogue and scrambled for a way to spin it to be palatable. “Um. Yes, my diamond. See, Pink Diamond observed how humans were able to consume minerals and break them down for metabolic functions. She theorized that the same would be true of gem shards. After about thirty generations of consuming gem shards with their food, we saw the first generation of these human gems emerge.”

“You say this was in her notes – I will see for myself.” Blue Diamond was furious, but wouldn’t raise her voice. “Pearl, access the station’s computer and bring me Pink’s notes.”

“Of course, my diamond,” the demure pearl responded and moved to the nearest control panel. From the gemstone in her chest, she projected images from Pink Diamond’s personal notes. Stills of the Earth, observations on humans eating. And then the theories. Holly-Blue watched as her diamond’s demeanor melted from upset to despondent. The diamond’s power swept through the room, and her grief over Pink Diamond drove all gems present to share in her tears.

Even the humans.

“That’s enough, Pearl,” Blue Diamond dismissed her attendant. The titanic woman reclined again on her cushion and looked upon the group of gems. “Tell me their capabilities, Agate, so that I can assign them purposes within the empire.” The diamond shed more tears which were felt by the rest of the gems. “And… thank you, for finishing Pink’s work. You will be awarded a personal pearl for your efforts.”

Holly-Blue was beyond pleased that her diamond had turned around on the subject so quickly, and launched into her speech about the fossils and their powers. She carefully used her grand gestures to wipe the sweat from her brow so no one could see how nervous she’d been. “Well, starting with the ambers, they have a hard upper limit on how hot a temperature they can endure….”

–

Blue Diamond’s control room on Homeworld was more detailed than Yellow or White’s. She had a lounging couch that could adjust its orientation, three waterfalls that emerged from detailed murals of her fellow diamonds and filled in recessed paths in the floor of a mural of herself in the same style. There she could deal with simple bureaucratic matters, which included the admittance of new gems to the rosters. It felt like only yesterday that Blue had shown Pink how to add her rose quartzes to the lists of gemkind.

Not long after she submitted the forms to have the new ‘fossil’ category gems added to the rosters to White and Yellow, Blue Diamond’s diamond-line communicator lit up with an incoming call.

“Greetings,” her pearl said with a curtsey of her lace dress, “this is the Blue Diamond control room. Blue Diamond will be with you in but a moment.”

Blue had expected Yellow to call her, but mere minutes after the documentation was submitted? The artistically-inclined diamond sighed and got ready to rise from her lounging couch. However, the subject of the call made Blue freeze in place.

“Oh, have I called at a bad time?” The coy voice of White Diamond oozed sweetness through the communicator. “I guess I’ll just call back, when Blue isn’t so busy – “

“No!” Blue launched herself from her couch and reached down for the communicator. “I’m sorry, White. I’m too used to dealing with emeralds and moissanites who think every slight delay is an emergency.” Blue hastily fixed her hair and pulled down her shawl so the absolute ruler of Homeworld could see her clearly.

White was like looking into a star. Radiant, blinding, and hazardous. Her jagged, pointed hair that shined with blazing light, her outstretched arms held in place for literal centuries, the interplay of her namesake color with its pitch opposite in her lips, eyes, and wardrobe. White barely reacted to Blue’s sudden appearance. “Ah, you _do_ have time for me? How wonderful.” The diamond of diamonds barely moved when she spoke – she barely moved at all. It was eerie to see White like that, as all four diamonds had once been a happy family.

When Pink was still there, anyway.

“I’ve noticed you had a new category of gem added. You haven’t had a new colony started and failed to report it, have you?” White layered her coy tone upon itself as she narrowed down on what she thought was a ‘gotcha’ moment.

“Not at all, White,” Blue responded emphatically. “One of Pink’s orphaned projects has completed. We’ve found a way to convert the shards of shattered gems into entirely new ones by using organics.” For a moment, Blue dared hope White would be reasonable about the whole thing. “I could send you the data, it’s so very exciting. Finally having something to _do_ with those shards, a relief for our storage space.”

White’s expression didn’t change from her serene smile, and she didn’t speak for a good minute. For sixty seconds, Blue was made to hold the projection in absolute silence while White played some power game with her. “I see. Our Pink is just so clever, isn’t she?”

That comment made Blue’s smile waver just a little bit. White had been with her and Yellow to blast the Earth in retaliation of Pink’s demise. Why had White referred to Pink in the present tense? Was it possible that as Blue openly mourned, and Yellow had taken to emotional suppression, White had gone into full _denial_?

White continued to speak, as Blue pondered. “Well, we’ll have to refine the process. Get these new gems to uniform consistency. I see that only one of the gems in this category are totally unique, the agatized and opalized bone will need to be worked until they conform to their parent roles. Are you listening, Blue?”

“Of course, White. I am dedicating as many resources as I can spare for the project and – “

“You will of course need to begin construction of new zoos to house more humans for conversion to gems. Yellow won’t mind a few of her peridots being diverted to oversee the production of these new gems, and refinement of the process. Kindergartners should have insight on improvements.”

Blue’s smile returned. She could hardly believed White had taken it so well. “Of course, White. Do you… agree with the roles I’ve set for the fossils?”

“They seem a perfect fit for those roles. The ambers will fill the role Pink’s rose quartzes were meant to occupy nicely. On a related note – do go ahead and deal those rose quartzes, won’t you Blue? Either shatter them or get them out of those bubbles – I don’t care which.” White blinked, the most her face had moved in perhaps thousands of years. “Depending on how effective Pink’s method is, I might need to talk with Yellow about those shards she used to make that geo-weapon.”

–

“A whole conversation? She called you and had a _dialogue_? Like old times?”

Blue nodded and reclined against the titanic bench of Yellow’s extraction chamber. “I know, it was so _bizarre_. I could hardly believe it.”

Across from her, Yellow Diamond scowled. Yellow cut an imposing figure – she looked like any surface she touched would be cut from the meeting. Yellow was sharp in almost every sense of the word. Around them clouds of steam rose as the two diamonds extracted minute portions of themselves for future gem production. Once, it had been Blue’s lavish baths which had been their extraction site; now, only Blue and Yellow partook.

“I can’t believe this,” Yellow groused. She leaned forward and rested her arms on her knees. “I’ve done everything expected of me, and I haven’t gotten _a_ word from her in thousands of years. Yet _you_ get a full conversation over something _Pink_ did.” The titanic gem clenched her fist so hard gaseous molecules nearby began to ionize.

Blue frowned, stood, and crossed the extraction chamber to sit beside her fellow diamond. The twin stones often found themselves in that position. “Maybe that’s for the best.” Blue held up her hand to stall Yellow when the sharp stone looked at her with disbelief. “I think there might be something… _wrong_ with White.”

“What?”

Blue looked side to side, a sudden burst of paranoia that a gem from White’s court was spying on them had crept into her mind. “When White talked about Pink it was in the present tense. Like Pink was still… with us.” The artistic gem met the militaristic gem’s eyes. “I think she might have taken Pink’s shattering harder even than me. You know how tough White was on her….”

“White isn’t the type to deny reality… what am I saying, of course she is,” Yellow shifted her tone mid-sentence as she paused to think about it. “Hmm. Maybe we need to request an audience with her.” They both knew it would likely take thousands of years for them to even get a moment of their fellow matriarch’s time – after they had all but demanded White join them in retaliation against the Earth, White had been distinctly annoyed with them. “In the meantime, there’s the issue these ‘fossils’ represent.” Yellow looked at Blue plaintively. “I don’t care for organic life, that’s been clear for eons. But all that’s been done to these things is that now they are pseudo-gems who do jobs other gems already do. Gems which do it better than they ever will, because it was _what they were made for_. Forcing these creatures into a life they aren’t cut out for, and will never excel at is _cruel_, Blue.”

“So was destroying their planet,” Blue said back. She wanted to be icy about it, but on some level she agreed with Yellow. The ambers were in their own niche, they would do… adequate. But the agatized and opalized bones would always be second-tier gems. They would exist to bolster proper gems, but never to be those who were bolstered. “Yet it was done anyway. Now we know organic gems are possible – it opens new avenues for research. Technology to replicate the healing ability in those ambers is vitally needed. We have how many cracked gems in bubbles, again?”

Yellow sighed and willed her extracted power to the drain in the center of the floor. “You’re right. I need to put together teams for _that_, and dedicate resources to producing new peridots to replace the ones requisitioned for your zoos. It was nice to see you, Blue.” Then she calmly walked from the extraction chamber and didn’t look back.

Blue thought, for a brief moment, about how easy it would be to grab onto Yellow and demand that she stay just a bit longer. Their schedules were so busy, it would be a decade before they could see each other again. But White expected her orders carried out.

Which meant Blue also had to go to the zoo and shatter all of Pink’s rose quartzes. One less thing to remember Pink by – the thought of it made Blue cry a little, alone in Yellow’s extraction chamber.

While she bemoaned the situation, a thought came to Blue. Perhaps she could solve the problem of the rose quartzes with the increased volume of humans she would be collecting. The titanic woman willed the last of her power into the extractors, and the steam with it. Then she rose and made her way to her ship.

–

The Left Arm of Authority wrapped itself around the zoo, and Blue Diamond disembarked from it to the station. A Hand of of Authority was already in a parking orbit when she had arrived – the peridots White had demanded of Yellow had arrived ahead of her. Blue Diamond let her pearl go ahead of her to announce her arrival and to prepare the way. Specifically, she wanted to talk with her agate and the peridot commander.

When she arrived in the landing area, the amethyst guards were in formation and saluting her already. Blue barely acknowledged them and walked through the pink room to the hallway. She stopped when she heard something crack under her feet. Blue looked down and saw that one of the immense floor tiles for the base had been broken by her weight. As she looked at it, there were more minor cracks in the tiles around the broken one. She looked around, as if for the first time, and saw that the facility had signs of wear and tear all around. Even the atmosphere seals on the windows were in need of repairs.

Oh how Pink would despair to see her zoo like this, Blue thought to herself and felt tears rolling down her face. Barely five minutes, and she was already crying. Blue Diamond steeled herself and forced herself to ignore the dozens of minor imperfections as she approached the audience chamber. While the peridots were at work, she would have them complete repairs.

Not long after the diamond made herself at home on the titanic cushion, her pearl returned with two agates. One was Blue’s own Holly-Blue, the other was the commander of Yellow’s loaned peridots. A taciturn quartz similar to Holly-Blue except that her hair was jagged and sharp, like Yellow Diamond’s, and she had her gem placed where her left eye should have been. They saluted her, and waited for Blue Diamond to speak.

With tearful tenderness, Blue reached up and drew down one bubbled rose quartz gem. Relative to her, the bubble was the size of a marble. The bubble was one of Pink’s, she had personally locked away the rose quartz cut after the infamous rebel had shown her colors. “Tell me,” she said at last. “How much of the personality from the shards used in your process remains?”

Holly-Blue Agate broke her salute to bow and responded with glee. “Almost none, my diamond. We’ve tracked some memories containing complex information, but an intact personality has never manifested.”

Blue tilted her head back, as if she didn’t believe the agate. It was a trick Blue had developed millions of years ago. In silence, she would stare at a gem with a look of displeasure on her face. If they lied, or had misrepresented information, the pressure would squeeze the truth from them. But Holly-Blue Agate remained firm in her statement, if suitably terrified of Blue’s displeasure. “I see. Good. Approach.”

The two agates advanced to the base of the stairs which would lead to Blue Diamond’s seat, and accepted the bubbled rose quartz when it was presented to them.

“I want you to incorporate these… _things_,” she tried to be angry but a sudden wave of grief over the congealed memories of Rose Quartz and Pink drove her to cry instead, “and add them into the process. Try to use them whole first, and if it cannot be done shatter them to use them in the original way.”

“Of course, my diamond.”

“With clarity and purpose, Blue Diamond,” Yellow’s agate added, still in her salute.

“Furthermore, this station is in desperate need of modernization and repair,” Blue pulled up her shawl so that her weeping eyes were hidden from the agates. They could still tell as they shed tears of their own in response. “Keep as much of the original structure and systems as possible. With the other zoos to follow, it is fine to make them cutting edge, but this zoo has history. Preserve it.”

“With vigor and dedication, Blue Diamond.” The yellow agate bowed deep to indicate her acceptance of the order.

“That will be all.”

Blue turned away from the agates as they bowed and turned their backs on her to leave. Time seemed to slip away from Blue as she sat in the audience chamber with her Pearl. Every time she looked up, there were fewer and fewer rose quartz gems in the room. Until there were none. One of Pink’s treasured possessions, the gems she had been so _proud of_, gone. One way or another.

Her pearl, ever gentle, acquired Blue Diamond’s attention with a doeful ‘my diamond’, and saluted her when the matriarch regarded her. “Your red-eye has found a new colony site.” She said nothing more, and left the decision of what to do with the information.

Blue Diamond wiped away her tears, and looked up at the vacant space where once there were rose quartzes. “I suppose I could just pass it off to White, Yellow, or one of my aquamarines. Let them deal with it while I… stay here.”

“Also, there is a status update on your fossilized human program. Your agate wishes to present her findings to you at your earliest convenience.”

Blue sighed. Trivialities, she assumed. “Fine. Send her in, when she’s ready.”

She slipped out of time again in her mourning, and when she came back to reality, her agate and a human from the containment unit were saluting her.

“My diamond,” Holly-Blue Agate said, beside herself with excitement. “We’ve had a massive breakthrough in the mandate you made regarding the rose quartz hybrids.” The terrifying commander clapped her hands and the human stepped forward. It was a male, with strong similarities to the ammonite hybrid that had once been presented to her. “We were not making any progress with combining the human and whole rose quartz gems, there will be a plethora of reports on the topic submitted to you for review shortly. We were all ready to begin shattering them, but an idea occurred to me. Perhaps we could combine our fossilization methods with the fusion experiments conducted by Yellow Diamond?”

Blue Diamond’s brow arched dangerously, as she visually instructed the agate to get to the point.

“Er, yes,” Holly-Blue stumbled verbally for a moment. “The conclusion being, we were able to succeed! May I present, the fourth gem in the fossil category: Jet!” She gestured to the human, with a near-manic smile. “Currently this is the only extant gem.”

“I see,” Blue Diamond said and looked at the human-gem hybrid with greater interest. “Why does it look similar to the ammonite you showed me?”

“The human base used for this hybrid is related to the base which was used in that particular ammonite.”

“Related in what way?”

Holly-Blue Agate began to visibly sweat at the topic, while the human giggled. Hastily the agate turned and glared daggers at the human. “Humans reproduce via cellular division with components drawn from two or more parents. Similar to how gems require extractions from multiple diamonds to properly form. If you would like specifics on how the two human bases relate to one another – “

“Include it in the report,” Blue Diamond dismissed with a wave of her hand. So large was she, that the gesture created a sudden strong wind. “Let me see its gemstone.”

The human turned around and adjusted its jacket so that its shoulders were exposed to her and lifted its hair. There, between the shoulder blades, was the gemstone. Five facets with a pentagon at the center, like the rose quartz base, but blackened. Rose quartzes were typically soft pink and luminous, but this ‘jet’ was dark and yet reflective. Blue Diamond squinted a bit, to see finer details, and then directed her gaze to the agate. “And nothing of the original gem remains?”

“Memories, at most, my diamond.”

“Hmm.” Blue looked at the human, and imperiously arched a brow. “Tell me, human. How does it feel? The gemstone in your back?”

“It makes me feel light, my diamond,” the human hybrid said in a gleeful tone. “Like I could jump and just float all day long.” He turned his head and grinned at her, with a wide smile the likes of which Blue hadn’t seen since Pink.

All at once, Blue Diamond was fascinated. The human could speak, in articulated sentences! It was able to grasp the concept that it belonged to her, and could find simple joy in that. But that smile combined with the ruddy skin tone, and its poofy hair immediately made her think of Pink. For just a moment, Pink’s silhouette was imposed over the jet’s. When the jet’s tears caught her eye, Blue realized she was crying too and hastily covered her eyes. “Agate,” she said after a moment. “Prepare a copy of the daily routine and care requirements for humans.” She reached out her hand and held it out for the human to walk onto, like it was a pet. The hybrid glanced at Holly-Blue before it lept into Blue Diamond’s hand and hugged her thumb with vigor. “I like this one. I would keep it with me for a while.”

“My diamond,” Holly-Blue protested. “We haven’t properly tracked what a jet’s powers will manifest as. This one doesn’t even have the requisite control to generate a bubble!”

“Then I will document it myself, and see that you’re informed.” Blue smiled sweetly at her new pet as she brought it up to her face. Instantly the human released her thumb to hug her cheek. She laughed ever so slightly from the ‘cheek’ of the display. It was just like how Pink would greet her after she returned from a colony. Blue’s gazed was less warm when it fell on Holly-Blue Agate. “Once my ship has everything needed for a human, I will be going off to oversee a new colony site. A portion of the resources will be diverted here to expand production of these hybrids. _That will be all_.”

Defeated, Holly-Blue bowed and backed away. “Yes, my diamond. Of course, my diamond.”

The jet waved at her as she left. “Goodbye, Holly-Blue! I’ll miss you!”

\---


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two -- Fossil Record**

Blue Diamond scrolled through the care instructions and routine that the humans in Pink’s zoo went through and her mind boggled. So many things could go wrong with the care of a human. They were a social species, so being kept in isolation for prolonged periods would drive them _insane_; they required daily ingestion of nutrients and liquids because their gem wasn’t connected well enough to supplant those needs; and humans needed daily play periods or, again, they would go insane.

Perhaps, she reflected, she hadn’t anticipated how cruel trying to adapt such beings to life in the gem empire would be. Perhaps, she reflected and let tears bubble at the corners of her eyes, if all this had been known earlier, Pink wouldn’t have spent so much time to try and save humanity. Blue Diamond sighed and put the Left Arm of Authority in position to pick up colonization equipment from the fabrication plants on Homeworld. Around her ship, Hands of Authority and Roaming Eyes similarly collected equipment which would be vital for her new colony’s completion.

She looked over in the control room of her ship, toward where her jet’s resting cushion had been placed. There she saw the human-gem hybrid and her pearl, in the act of instruction. Pearl would create a bubble, and let Jet try to create one as well. Blue Diamond watched her jet try to create multiple bubbles and fail, and began to take note of minor imperfections which would help tell it… him apart from other jets as they were produced. The jet had blue-green eyes, and while his hair was poofy like the ammonite’s, it didn’t defy gravity nearly as much.

While she watched, Jet noticed her attention and grinned at her. That was something Blue Diamond would treasure, Jet’s smile. It was big, bright, free of all worry. Like how Pink’s had been before… everything.

Blue Diamond went back to work, and spotted some problems with the zoo’s categorization systems. The captive humans had a naming convention similar to a gem’s, alphanumeric in nature. Technically Jet was known as Jet Aych-Two. But this convention only allowed numbers up to ‘ten’, which would limit the human population to two-hundred sixty. Wholly insufficient for hybrid production. She sent a message to her agate to sort the matter out at once.

Bureaucracy took time to navigate, which she was made aware of as her pearl and jet would stop working on his bubbling for Jet to sleep, or eat or… something else which required Pearl escort the hybrid out of the room. Every time Blue thought she had been working only a little while, and she could glance over, the hybrid and the pearl were doing something else.

The two of them seemed to get up to such games together – every time Blue looked their way they were up to something silly. Jet hadn’t managed a bubble of his own yet, but he had a grand old time on bubbles Pearl made for him. Once, when she looked over, Blue saw Jet rolling around on top of the bubble by walking backward. Another time, he would bounce from one bubble, pop it, and leap onto another bubble which Pearl placed in the air. The skill of his acrobatics made Blue wonder how closely related jets were to opals – the gladiators of gemkind.

On a whim, she waved her hand and encased Jet in a royal blue bubble of her own and drew it to her. “Just a moment, I need to see something,” she soothed the human as she called up a robonoid from her throne. Shaped like a triangle, the particular purpose behind the robonoid was to hunt down gems and shatter them. But it also came with an advanced scanner suite. Blue made use of that while she had it examine the jet for composition and structural integrity.

“My diamond,” Jet laughed while the scanner looked at his gem through his clothes with a beam of orange light, “it tickles!”

Blue noted that jets could potentially sense when they were being scanned. There was no record of it in regards to other fossils, so perhaps it was unique. She muttered to herself while she examined the composition. “Not a true mineral, odd. Mostly carbon with impurities of sulfur and iron. Internal structure suggests brittleness, so likely not a front-line soldier.” Blue sighed and supported her head with her free hand. “It would be so much easier if more of the rose quartz used to make you survived, but it can’t be helped.” If more of the original gem had survived, then Blue would be eternally suspicious of the jets. Rose Quartz had been a legendary threat, as evidenced by her successful revolt and assassination of Pink. The beam intensified as it looked into the gemstone’s mystical energies. Blue was distracted by Jet’s hysterical laughter in her bubble – it was so precious, so cute.

The display for the mystic scan brought up runes Blue had never seen before in a gem. Only one of them was something she recognized, a pair of wings which emerged from a disc – the indicator for flight-capable gems. Another rune was split in half – empty on one side with only a + near the transition to the other half, which was filled except for an empty – symbol. A third one was a trio of Z’s in various sizes. The meanings behind these runes she would have to divine herself.

On a whim, Blue showed Jet the symbols she had found on the mystical scan. “I don’t suppose _you_ know what these mean?”

The hybrid ceased his hysterical laughter as the robonoid returned to Blue’s throne. Once he had breathed deeply several times, he looked at the runes and squinted. “Um. I will make things turn small?”

Blue looked at the rune again and squinted. “I suppose that could be what that means. We’ll find out eventually.” With that she burst the bubble which kept Jet aloft and let him fall into her hand. Gracefully, she moved so that Jet could hop to the floor. “Back to learning bubbles, you.”

Jet hugged her thumb again, then bounded off to her pearl.

Blue looked back at the details on Jet’s gemstone while she waited for the equipment to finish loading. It was funny – from the records she was looking at, the mineraloid jet was a precursor to coal, which in turn was a precursor to diamonds. A hybrid was closer to an actual diamond in structure than even moissanites, the ‘false diamonds’.

If only Pink had lived to see her hybrids come into existence. She would have adored them. Blue quietly cried to herself at the thought of Pink playing with her human-gem hybrids until it was time to deploy for the new colony site.

–

Pink’s zoo had often seen the Left Arm of Authority in orbit, it was a familiar object in the eyes of the gems and humans aboard. However, the day came when the Right Arm of Authority arrived to orbit the station instead. The diamond’s personal vessels were colored after them, and while the Left Arm almost always had its hand open, the Right Arm’s hand was closed in a fist. Yellow Diamond extended no courtesy of announcement for her arrival, she merely sent ahead her pearl and a cadre of topaz troops to ensure the environment was fit for a diamond.

Yellow Diamond’s pearl was attentive, dedicated, and quite vocal in the demands her diamond placed on the facility. Backed up by the blocky, stoic topazes, her commands carried substantial weight.

For the first time since its inception, the zoo bore Yellow Diamond’s weight. Literally, and metaphorically, that weight was different than Blue’s. Blue Diamond was diffuse, sorrowful, soft. Yellow was none of these; she was honed to a fine edge, sharp, and ready to cut at the first sign of resistance. Tiles in the floor broke under her feet, even though they had just been replaced after Blue Diamond had done the same.

“Bring me one of the agatized bones,” she commanded to no one in particular while she advanced to the audience chamber, where Blue had wallowed for so long.

“Of course, my diamond,” her pearl responded, and barked orders to the topazes who in turn walked into the hallways of the facility to fulfill the command.

When Yellow arrived, she immediately looked over the room. Much had been done to modernize the facility, however the work was incomplete. The pillars which supported the roof were covered in scaffolding as brawny bismuth gems worked to lay additional power channels within them. A galaxy warp was in the process of being installed, sized up for a diamond to use. All the workers stopped to look, and salute, at Yellow Diamond as she entered.

“Did I tell any of you to stop working? Then get back to work,” she growled as she traversed the room and stood near the diamond-sized cushion which had been Pink’s idea of a throne. The military commander stood with her hands clasped behind her, and looked out the window at the gas giant which the zoo orbited. Having a diamond in proximity made the workers work harder, for fear that any mistake would be sufficient cause for Yellow to shatter them. She didn’t need to do anything, the investment she’d made in her public image millions of years ago continued to pay dividends.

The sounds of work kept her distracted, anyway. She was rarely still, rarely in one place long enough to think about Pink and what had happened to her. Work and other’s work would keep those thoughts at bay for a little while.

She turned when the doors to the audience chamber opened again. Her topazes brought a human with them, lifted off the ground in case she became defiant. Zoomans, as the subspecies became known, were more docile than wild humans so such measures were wholly unnecessary. Yellow examined the human as her topazes put it down and backed away. Dark-skinned, hair in black cords, Yellow assumed it to be female, and it had its gem on its right thigh. As soon as it was released, the human saluted her and bowed at the waist. No visible diamond insignia to designate which court it belonged to – that was something Blue needed to fix.

“Fossil,” Yellow barked imperiously. “As an agate-derivative, you are charged with maintaining order in the ranks and ensuring orders are carried out. Do you understand?”

“I-I think so, my diamond,” the human hybrid answered with hesitation.

“Already you’ve failed at that mission objective – you ignorantly say I’m your diamond when I’m not. You belong to Blue Diamond, though it looks like I’ll have to get involved in working your cut of gem myself.” The diamond of war crossed the gap between her position and the fossil’s in mere moments. “An agate needs to be terrifying, not meek. An agate needs to inspire, to lead from the front, and to know when to crack the whip. I look at you and I see literally none of those qualities – would you care to _explain yourself_?”

“I… I don’t know _how_ to do those things,” the human responded as if she were about to _cry_ of all things. “Holly-Blue hasn’t taught us any of them yet.”

“So you pass your deficiency off onto your agate? Ugh, you’ve been coddled too long. Just like what happened with Pink, well it won’t happen this time.” Yellow paced along the width of the audience chamber and pinched the bridge of her nose. “If Blue’s being so negligent that her own gems don’t know their duties, I’ll have to fill in.” More to herself than anyone else, the diamond muttered, “at least the ambers don’t have a mold to fit yet.”

At least the fossil hadn’t broken the salute yet, so she’d done nothing worth actual punishment or Yellow’s hands would be tied. The diamond found the situation the hybrids were in to be needlessly cruel – gem society was built upon unrelenting pressure which organics didn’t have the traits to survive. But they’d been thrust into it, so Yellow would see they got the best possible chance to adapt. To that end, she had an idea. “Pearl,” she called. The servant caste gem stepped into her line of view and saluted elegantly. “Summon Jasper facet nine, cut twelve-gee-eye. Send some amethysts in one of this station’s Roaming Eyes.”

“At once, my diamond.” Her pearl enthusiastically left to fulfill the orders, and turned her nose up at the human as she passed.

“As for this one,” Yellow pointed at the human, then flicked her finger toward her topazes. “Return it to where you found it. But keep tabs on it and the other fossils. We’ll need to whip them into shape.”

One of her topazes glanced at the other, and then raised her hand.

Yellow Diamond sighed through her nose, and all but growled. “What?”

“One of the ammonites is off-station, my diamond,” the topaz informed her with dutiful deference. “According to the station’s agate, they use the ammonites’ hypnotic voice to lure new humans in for capture to bolster the population.”

While opals were primarily meant for entertaining combat, their hypnotic voices were useful in colonization efforts to corral organics. Yellow Diamond couldn’t fault the decision, and simply folded her hands behind her back. “I see. Ensure that it is returned to the confinement area when its mission is complete.”

Her topazes bowed at the waist, picked up the emotionally unstable fossil, and carried her from Yellow Diamond’s presence. Yellow turned her back on the poor organic as it was carried off. She didn’t want to look at what necessary cruelty had wrought. She clenched her hands behind her back and strode back to her original position. It had been cruel of Pink to try and make the humans into something they weren’t. And it had been negligently cruel of Blue to allow it to proceed. And now it was cruel of Yellow that she had to do what neither of the other diamonds involved had been willing to do – put in the work to make this mess _work_. It would have been better if Pink had just stifled the humans when she could and end their suffering quickly. It would have been better if Blue had just left the Earth alone and let the cluster deal with it. And it would have been better if Yellow hadn’t ever given the Earth to Pink to begin with.

She clenched her hands again, and small amounts of her electric aura flared along her body. “Has it become necessary for me to _repeat myself_?” She spoke to the workers who had slowed their tasks to a near crawl to watch Yellow speak with the agatized bone. They got back to work, a bit faster than their original speed.

–

Peridot Five-X-G had come out of her hole, been assigned her limb-enhancers, and given her orders. Go to the docking station for Roaming Eyes in Facet Twenty-Four and perform routine maintenance. It was a quick job, clean out garbage data, replace some damaged parts; all in all it only took fourteen years of work to get done.

But then a new assignment came almost the instant she reported her task completed. If she’d been a moment later, then she wouldn’t have been available for it. And what a job it was! She was to be part of a research team to duplicate the abilities of a new gem’s powers technologically. Peridot was to report to the Hand of Authority docking bay in Facet Nineteen, where the other research team members would be present.

All research was to be done on an abandoned colony site of Yellow Diamond’s. Such a remote location would ensure that the research team’s mandate didn’t interfere with the production of new gems in the cabochon, and keep it out of the diamonds’ personal business.

The docking bay was filled with Hands of Authority, massive gem warships styled after Yellow Diamond’s own ship, a right hand. Behind the diamond’s own vessels, the Hands of Authority were the mightiest ships in the gem fleet; often they would serve as flagship command vessels for emeralds to command. As far as Peridot knew, Blue Diamond had no equivalent to the Hand of Authority in her fleet, and neither did White Diamond. Not that it was necessary for them to do so, Yellow had more than enough to spare.

When she arrived, she was the ninth peridot to do so, and fell in line along her fellows without question. Like her, they were all a pleasant shade of green with yellow hair in various sharp configurations and most had limb enhancers. To Peridot’s embarrassment, she saw two Era-One peridots in the line as well. They didn’t need limb enhancers to meet their height and limb length requirements. Naturally, they would be the project leads. Not her. Never her.

Once all twenty peridots assigned to the project were gathered, their commander made her entrance. Diminutive in height, a yellow sapphire flanked by four ruby guards made their way to the front of the line of peridots. The yellow sapphire had her circular gem with the triangular cut placed on her back, her hair was sharp and covered her cyclopean eye with jagged bangs, and her dress evoked imagery of electricity.

“You were all fated to be on this mission,” the sapphire said with gentle firmness. “None of you are more or less important than the others. Our diamond expects us not to let doubt or petty squabbles get in our way.” She barely looked at the peridots while she talked. “I know exactly whom among you will disappoint our diamond, but there is always a chance I’ll be wrong. Prove me wrong. Let’s get to work.”

The sapphire, and her guards, led the way to the loading ramp of a Hand, where Peridot saw the principle cargo were bubbled gems. _Cracked_ bubbled gems.

“Our diamond has commanded us to study the new gem type in Blue Diamond’s court, called amber. They possess the power to heal and repair gems and technology. Our diamond desires this power for all gemkind. You will see her will done.” The sapphire stopped and turned to regard the first peridot in the line behind her. “Or you will pay the price.”

When they arrived to a work area inside the Hand, they saw what could only be the new gem ‘Amber’ resting on an a branched pseudo-organic structure in the middle of the work area. Tables with bubbled cracked gems and pebbles on standby surrounded the perimeter. There were two of the ambers, and they were radically different. One looked rather like a quartz soldier, with a bulky and muscular build, ruddy skin, and brown hair that flipped upward in spikes as it grew off the main mass. The other was more curved, with fair skin and yellow hair that combined the ‘downward volume’ typical in Blue Diamond’s gems. Respectively, their gems were at the base of the throat, and dead-center of their chest. Peridot couldn’t fathom why they were so wildly different – was one an _off-color_?

“These are the two ambers our diamond has provided us for our research purposes. The rubies which oversee my safety have been trained in their care – you will differ to them in such matters. Remember – document _everything_.” The yellow sapphire nodded, and left for the deeper areas of the ship. Three of her rubies stayed behind, and took up positions around the ambers’ strange seat.

Peridot realized they had been ordered to get to work right away, before the other peridots, and scurried to a work station. At the station she picked, there was an opaque purple bubble which contained a badly cracked ruby. Peridot easily set her limb-enhancers to record mystographical information and carried the bubbled gem to the ambers. The rubies didn’t stop her, so she assumed she was in the right. Peridot held the bubbled gem up to the ambers but they looked at her like she was the odd one.

“You want us to play with the bubble?” The more quartizine of the two asked – in a gruff, deep voice that barely sounded feminine. “Or with the gem inside?”

“What – “ Peridot replied, shocked and confused. “You ambers have healing powers, right? We need you to heal these gems.”

The slimmer amber tilted her head at Peridot. “The gem inside is… hurt?”

“Yes!” Peridot was exasperated, and it showed in her tone. “Your cabochon clearly lacks observational skills. This ruby is almost cracked all the way through – if she gets more stress she’ll shatter. So _yes_, she’s hurt! Hurt real bad!”

That seemed to activate their duty response, as both ambers began to bark ‘hurt!’ over and over and frantically grabbed the bubble. After a moment of their struggling, Peridot realized they didn’t know how to pop the bubble – and to be fair, neither did she.

One of the rubies coughed and produced her gem weapon, a dinky little bowie knife. Peridot took it with her limb enhancers, popped the bubble with the pointed end, and returned the weapon.

With the cracked ruby in their hands, the two ambers’ gems began to glow, and cast the room in a brilliant [golden](https://youtu.be/OmwN0gViGzw) light. The light pulsed as the new gems hummed a tune and a resinous fluid built up around their gemstones which both ambers scooped up and slathered onto the ruby.

Peridot checked her mystographical scan and took note of the results. Harmonics were involved, so the humming was likely important. But there was strange readings which related to time. It messed with her chronometer slightly. When she looked back at the ambers and the ruby, the cracked gem was encased in a solid piece of the resin. As she watched, the cracks in the gemstone began to fill. All the while, the ambers did not stop their humming or their active glow – but their expressions became less panicked as time progressed.

After less than a minute, the encased ruby was restored. Then suddenly the resinous covering exploded off her gem as the ruby’s reformation occurred. The small, red, and square gem looked around like she expected to be in a fight, all while Peridot picked up the pieces of the resinous coating for further study.

“Log date One Four-Five Three,” Peridot muttered to her log system as she returned to her workstation. “I have begun my study of the healing properties of the amber gem type….”

After Peridot had shown what was expected, the other peridots joined in, and a queue formed for who would next present a gem to the ambers to be healed.

“Is anyone going to tell me what happened?” Asked the healed ruby. No one answered her.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three - - Doom Senses**  
  
The world Blue Diamond’s red eye had found was almost entirely water. The most considerable landmass was on the northern magnetic pole, where an icy continent lay. Scattered islands were dotted across the surface, but almost never in archipelagos. Most of the life on the planet was aquatic, which would be perfectly fine for Blue’s taste. She could immortalize them in the form of art and architecture which her colony would sport. First things first, the moon base had to be set up.  
  
The Left Arm of Authority was frozen in synchronized orbit around her colony’s moon, which itself sported life and would be colonized itself if things went smoothly. The moon was primarily forested, tropical jungles near the equator, which transitioned into temperate deciduous forests and finally taiga near the poles. Trees was _the_ dominant life form on the moon. The moon base for colonization was set up in the space between titanic trees in the deciduous region – its stark white contrasted the dark browns and greens which surrounded it on all sides.  
  
While the base was constructed, Blue watched Jet devour a green-colored synth-fruit produced by the program her agate had provided. He seemed to enjoy the fruit, enough to comment on its taste when his monitor-earrings asked him for feedback. This prompted Blue to look up some information about human diet. Apparently organics were categorized partially by their diet, with the majority of overall organic life using light as their food source – like gems. Humans did so as well, they needed certain ultraviolet light waves to generate what was called ‘vitamin d’ – however human-gem hybrids had their gems to provide that.  
  
Humans were classified as ‘megafauna’, organics bigger than the average small gem. Megafauna were sorted by diets of primarily plant life ‘herbivorous’, other organics ‘carnivorous’, or both ‘omnivorous’. Humans fell into the third category, as they had been observed eating both plant and animal life. However the zoo designers didn’t want to replicate organic animals for the humans to eat – so the synth-fruit was developed. Effectively, Zoomans were herbivorous.  
  
Blue was surprised that there was so much information on organic life available, and looked up who had provided it. The answer left her feeling despondent and weeping. Pink had studied the organics, and it was she who had provided all this detailed information – with additions from Holly-Blue Agate. Long after her shattering, it became clear that Pink’s ideal place would have been the production of organic gems. But when Pink had been colonizing the Earth, she had only pleas and theories – naturally, Blue and Yellow had dismissed her.  
  
Thousands of years too late, Blue realized Pink was _right_.  
  
A series of pops drew Blue’s attention out of her despondency. She looked up to see Jet bouncing off of one bubble, and flipping up to the next to gain altitude. Blue couldn’t tell if they were Pearl’s bubbles, or ones which Jet had made, but soon enough the hybrid had gained the ten meters he needed to jump up and hug Blue Diamond’s cheek again. He was right in the path of her tears, but didn’t seem to mind. Gently, she reached up her hand and lifted him off her face – right away he went to hugging her thumb. “What’s gotten into you?”  
  
Her crying had forced Jet to cry as well, and he hugged her thumb like it was all that kept him aloft. “I’m trying to squish the sadness out of you,” he said like it explained everything.  
  
Blue blinked as she processed what she’d heard and smiled a little. “Thank you for trying,” she told the hybrid gently. “But I think if you squished all the sadness out of me, there’d be nothing left.”  
  
Jet relaxed his hug just a little, and looked up at her. “Well… maybe if I squish out a little at a time, you could fill yourself up with something else?”  
  
Curious, Blue Diamond arched a fine brow. “And what would I fill myself up with instead?”  
  
“Things that make you smile!” Even though Blue’s tears still forced him to cry, Jet grinned up at her. “Your smile is so pretty – it’s the nicest thing I’ve ever seen!”  
  
“Well that might just be because you haven’t seen all that much of the universe yet.” With her free hand, she used one finger to gently rub the hybrid’s head. “But thank you for the compliment.” Surprisingly, she felt a little better. Less stuck in the perpetual cycle of grief she’d been in a moment prior. She put her free hand down, and allowed Pearl to rise onto it. Then she brought both her attendant gems to the loop of hair which passed beneath her gemstone. “How about we see some of what this moon and this colony have in store for us, hmm?” By her will, several scouting robonoids deployed from her ship. Blue Diamond brought their transmissions to her control room through massive projectors. Together the three of them explored the moon without ever having to leave the ship. It was improper for a diamond to wander a forest, so it would likely be the only time Blue got to see it firsthand.  
  
–  
  
Once the base was set up, Blue Diamond went right to work planning the colony. Only minor alterations to the control room were needed for Jet’s extended presence. However the hybrid and her Pearl did seem to enjoy playing in the water effects which Blue adorned her bases with. Even though humans were typically a tropical species, they could readily adapt to different climates if the tools to survive were present. That included the water, it seemed – as even though Holly-Blue Agate described their swimming ability as ‘poor’, Jet would repeatedly take to the water and swim for exercise and enjoyment. Often he would encourage Pearl to join him.  
  
Blue allowed it, provided she was available to see to her duties when called on. Every so often when she checked in on the two of them, Blue would see Pearl teaching Jet how to walk on the surface of the water, or bubbling sections of water and playing with it. Any time she needed her pearl, her servant quickly responded without needing Blue to raise her voice.  
  
It was _nice_, Blue found, to be working on a colony again. There would be times when she would slip into fits of tears over Pink, but work could draw her out of it, or Jet would do something _adorable_. She laughed more in the week following her colony’s beginning than she had in thousands of years.  
  
At some point, Jet had managed to make bubbles reliably. He would use them for his play periods, or to scale heights he normally wouldn’t be able to get to, other such things. As Blue was designing a spire sized adequately for her, she happened to look over and saw Jet in a bubble that floated near her shoulder. She hadn’t a clue how long he’d been there, but it had been long enough for the human to go to sleep. The hybrid’s sleeping position wasn’t ideal, which caused his mouth to loll open and struggle for air during his sleep. It produced enough noise to shake the bubble.  
  
“If you wanted to see what I was up do, you could have just asked to be up here,” she scolded the sleeping human as if he were a naughty pet. With one hand, she casually popped the translucent black bubble and caught the still sleeping hybrid. Then she transferred him to the loop of hair below her gemstone and went back to work.  
  
Sleep would naturally detract from any fossil’s work performance she thought as she kept working. Even in optimal conditions, the need to eat, sleep, and play would put fossils behind more efficient gems. But if Holly-Blue Agate was correct, they would be able to produce more fossils in the long run via human reproduction. But, per Pink’s notes, gems could sleep too. She had tried it, and said that it granted her visions – which the humans called ‘dreams’.  
  
Pink only documented one dream – three great women who were joined by a fourth after a meteor fell on Homeworld. The meteor was cracked open, and a pink element was found inside which pebbles worked into someone entirely new. Blue knew the story well – that was how Pink had come to join them – she had lived through it.  
  
Perhaps, when she had free time, she could give sleep a chance. Perhaps her dream would give her some profound insight. Perhaps it would let her see Pink again. A tear fell from her eye, directly onto Jet and woke the hybrid up from the shock.  
  
–  
  
Jaspers were soldiers. Big, orange and red-skinned quartz soldiers made for strength and fighting spirit. They were noted for their determination, resilience, and destructive power. And she was the best jasper ever made. She’d come out of her hole during an attack on her kindergarten, and smashed eighty rebels before the sun set. It wasn’t a compliment to say she was the best at what she did, it was a statement of fact.  
  
Yellow Diamond had trusted Jasper to solve her problems for thousands of years. Put her into unwinnable situations, total chaos, and Jasper had resolved the situation masterfully through application of violence. Put her in a fight, and she was an unstoppable force.  
  
But then came the day when Yellow Diamond called on her for something she wasn’t made for. Teaching. A Roaming Eye full of Blue Diamond’s second-hand amethysts was sent out to pick Jasper up from Yellow Diamond’s latest completed colony to ‘fix’ some of Blue Diamond’s agates opals on Yellow Diamond’s behalf.  
  
Agates were quartzes too, Jasper had served under hundreds. All they had to do was shout orders, _maybe_ participate in a battle, and crack a whip to keep weaklings in line. Opals were more complex, they were fighters who fought to _entertain_ more important gems. How could something so simple be screwed up? Jasper got her answer as the Roaming Eye emerged from warp space to see a massive sword-shaped space station all of pink crystal.  
  
Ah, that’s how, she thought. Put them in charge of _humans_. What were opals even _doing_ out there?  
  
Unmitigated horror was her reward when she asked those questions of Yellow Diamond. Humans had been fed the shards of shattered gems, and over time absorbed enough of them that they _became_ gems. Jasper didn’t let her horror and disgust affect her salute or professional behavior. It was one of the hardest things she’d ever done, especially when Yellow Diamond allowed her to see the _monsters_. Human in shape, but each had a gemstone that allowed them powers and abilities their kind was too weak to handle. There were four varieties, two of which were unique. Opal derivatives, and agate derivatives were the two versions Yellow Diamond summoned her for. Ammonites and Fossils respectively. Yellow had made Jasper look as unturned humans were carefully fed gem shards to use their inner fluids to dissolve the pieces of fallen gems into slurry and then incorporate it into themselves.  
  
“They should all be destroyed,” Jasper muttered as she looked on the scene in a cold sweat.  
  
“I agree,” Yellow Diamond quipped. “But they’re Blue’s. And there are _limits_ to what I am allowed to do with Blue’s gems. Which is where you come in.” Yellow Diamond turned her head barely enough to look at Jasper, who barely came up past the diamond’s ankle. “Your mission is to get these gems into line with their roles – specifically the agates and opals. It will be difficult, but your history of service leads me to believe you will do adequately.”  
  
Jasper didn’t give voice to the utter vile _revulsion_ she felt at the idea of interacting with the gem-eating monsters she saw through a viewing window. Instead, she pushed that feeling down, with the other hundred-score feelings she couldn’t allow herself to process. “I’ll start with the agates,” she decided after a moment of gathering her thoughts. “They’ll help reinforce the training on the opals when we’re gone.”  
  
“Good. Blue’s away to colonize a planet right now, and the galaxy warp between those two points isn’t set up yet. I’ll check in as my schedule allows.” Yellow Diamond folded her hands behind her back. “I don’t want this to be a patch-job, jasper. I don’t want this done _quickly_, I want this done _correctly_. See to it that you don’t need to visit here ever again once your task is done.”  
  
“Of course, Yellow Diamond.” Jasper saluted, and quietly thought to herself. She had to get this right, so she’d never have to deal with those _horrible things_ again.  
  
“Good. Get to work as soon as possible. I have colonies of my own to manage.” Yellow Diamond turned away from the viewing window, and walked down the hall toward her ship’s docking bay. The thunderous boom of her footsteps faded as she departed, and Jasper felt suddenly alone.  
  
Alone with _them_. She locked her jaw as she looked at them. They would eat _her_ if they got the chance. Her gemstone was small, it was placed on her face where her nose would be. It would be so easy for them to pop her into their mouths and then… _she’d be gone_. Worse than being shattered, worse than being a _failure_. Jasper had fought Rose Quartz. She had fought to avenge Pink Diamond. But Pink Diamond had created the method for these _things_ to come into the world.  
  
For a horrifying moment, Jasper almost _thanked_ Rose Quartz’s memory for destroying Pink Diamond, if her diamond had wanted to create animals which saw gems as _food_.  
  
“Aww look,” a passing amethyst said as she looked through the window. “That one’s using their strength to juggle other humans in bubbles! That’s so cute!”  
  
Jasper could only stare at the amethyst in absolute mystified horror as the lesser quartz cooed over the monster and went back to her duties. Was Jasper the only one who saw the creatures for what they really were?  
  
She took a deep breath, straightened her back, squared her shoulders and set herself on her path. Even if they were monsters, even if she had to acknowledge she was afraid of them, the diamonds expected her to make proper gems out of them. There were agates out there who needed to learn how to be quartz soldiers.  
  
But she would keep a gem destabilizer on her at all times while teaching them. In case any of them looked hungry.  
  
–  
  
“Log Entry Two Five Three Seven,” Peridot said to her built-in recorder. She was at a work station while she and other peridots worked on their assigned duties. “The ambers are a borderline defective gem type, I’ve noticed. They require special circumstances to work, cannot operate at temperature extremes, and require daily maintenance or their mental health will deteriorate.” She picked up some fragments of solidified resin she had collected over the course of the work period. “However their unique abilities make pandering to them a necessity. Naturally, this is why Yellow Diamond desires a technological equivalent, so the ambers can be retired and newer – better gems can take their place.”  
  
When the first generation of quartz soldiers downgraded the rubies from the de facto soldier to mere guards, they replaced the older pewter gems. Those pewters were quietly disposed of, or kept as relics in bubbles. When topazes first emerged, similar fates were imagined for rubies; but the difficulty in producing topazes restricted their implementation.  
  
The resin, peridot found, lost its restorative quality after use. However, it would regain it when the ambers would activate their abilities again. So far her efforts to obtain liquid resin had been thwarted by the amber’s cumbersome design. They couldn’t produce the resin on their own will, someone had to be ‘hurt’ to get them to generate it.  
  
At least she had been provided with the full identification codes for the ambers to tell them apart. The big bulky ‘male’ apparently was Amber En-Seven, and the more petite ‘female’ was Amber Eye-Five. They were provided in the pair because they had been ‘choosened’ for each other. Peridot didn’t understand the term’s context, but from what the rubies had told her it involved the production of additional ambers. The ruby had been hesitant to share details, as it involved apparently unpleasant aspects of Blue Diamond’s method for producing the gems. Peridot had learned that for ‘breeding’ a ‘male’ and ‘female’ had to be ‘choosened’ for good ‘trait inheritance’.  
  
“Blue Diamond’s kindergartners are maddeningly inefficient, as a side note. Excessive use of made-up words, arcane rituals around gem production, ugh it’s just so _wasteful_.” Peridot’s detached fingers rubbed her face while she worked with her other limb enhancer. Yellow Diamond was wise to get the matter out of their hands and into hers. Blue Diamond would surely appreciate her help.  
  
“What is ‘wasteful’?”  
  
Peridot jumped at the sudden, foreign voice that asked her a question over her shoulder. She looked, and there was Amber Eye-Five, who smiled at her as if she hadn’t just ambushed a poor, lovable peridot.  
  
Peridot steeled herself and glared at the defective gem. “Wasteful is what you are,” she told the amber viciously. “The way you’re produced and your powers work uses up more resources than is needed.”  
  
The amber bent forward to rest her hands on her knees, to better look Peridot in the eyes. “What is a ‘resources’?”  
  
Peridot was stunned for a solid second or two. She hadn’t thought the ambers were so defective their _cognitive abilities_ weren’t at gem standard. “Okay,” she said, and gestured with her detached fingers. “First order of business. Resource is the singular, resources is the plural.”  
  
“What is – “  
  
“_Singular_ means _only one_, _plural_ means _more than one_.” She talked slow, so the amber could understand her. “_Resources_ are things you use to accomplish a task. A _task_ is something you want to do, or someone else wants you to do. Do you comprehend?”  
  
Eye-Five giggled. “You’re full of big words!”  
  
Peridot legitimately considered screaming in frustration for a moment before she considered something: if she could improve the amber’s cognitive functions, she could have the amber explain how her powers worked. Trick the defective gem into accelerating her own replacement! Another brilliant plan by the lovable Peridot.  
  
She took a deep breath and met the amber’s eyes. “Yes I am. Would you like to be full of big words too?”  
  
The amber nodded enthusiastically, and Peridot smirked at how easy it would be to get the clod to replace herself.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four – Abuse and Defiance**

Pearl had taught Jet most of what he knew. Words, so he could understand what their diamond wanted of him, how to access his gem powers – as far as she was permitted – so that he could please her with his magical efforts, and finally how to be a pleasing ornament for Blue Diamond. She found the third one was trickier than she’d anticipated, for his body didn’t move the way a gem’s did. He couldn’t alter how his body bent as it suited him – he had rigid structures inside him which limited his mobility. Unfortunate for him, but she did her best.

Lesson one was how to flounce pleasingly. Pearl would drape herself on a structure or surface, and instruct Jet to mimic her. He was heavier, so he struggled to get it right. But with practice, she was sure he could flounce with the best of them. Lesson two was how to dance. Jet took to dance like a lapis to the water. Stretches and practice moving in unexpected directions allowed him to make minor adjustments to his posture to accommodate a mimicry of true gem dance.

Balancing on his toes had been, by far, the hardest part in learning to dance. He could do so for a few seconds, but balancing on a bubble helped him gain stability for simple fact that if he lacked it he would fall. The first time he fell, he had become a bawling wreck that their diamond had to calm down. Pearl found out later on that Jet had never felt pain before, and didn’t know how to react.

He got better about managing his response to pain, though even minor landings on his head or bad landings on joints would leave him bawling again. Blue Diamond understood that it was necessary for Jet to learn how to dance, however. She had confided in Pearl that it was likely jets would come to accompany pearls in the servant caste, alongside spinels.

Where Pearl erred was on lesson three, singing. She didn’t err purposefully, for she hadn’t known what would happen. But as she taught the notes to Jet, and he sang them back to her, she felt something was wrong. But singing was vital for a servant, so Pearl pressed on, and taught him a simple song.

_ “Twinkle twinkle, little star / How I wonder what you are,”_ Jet sang back to her after she’d sung it to him. Instantly something was terribly wrong. Jet smiled like he was happy as could be, Pearl felt her limbs grow heavy. _ “Up above the world so high / Like a diamond in the sky.”_

Pearl couldn’t stand anymore, she fell to her knees. Jet didn’t know what was wrong, he was focused on singing his first ever song.

_ “When the blazing sun is gone / When there nothing shines upon.”_

Pearl’s vision darkened, and she felt herself fall forward – then, nothing. She was unable to move, unable to see. Until something shifted in the darkness.

_ “Then you show your little light / Twinkle, twinkle all the night.”_

Pearl felt fear dig its claws into her as the something in the dark moved again. But as soon as it appeared, there was color to replace it. Turquoise and white gobbled up the blackness, and left a scene of wonder in its place. An endless expanse of water which was dotted with spiral spires decorated in statues which looked like Pearl’s drawings. Sheer lacy fabric was strewn between the spires and danced in the wind. Gems gracefully crossed these bridges like they were made of solid stone! And in her hand was an order from her diamond to explore the world, and see its wonders. What a wonderful day!

She completely forgot the fear she had felt before she had the vision of the wonderful place.

–

Blue Diamond had been hard at work when she heard Pearl singing to Jet to teach him. His voice wasn’t practiced, but once he’d gotten it right their harmonies would please her greatly she imagined. The choice of song was something Blue had once sung to Pink when she taught the new diamond how to sing. Bittersweet, it drove Blue to tear up. What worried her was why Jet’s rendition of the song made her feel listless, exhausted.

_ “Then the traveler in the dark / Thanks you for your little spark.”_

Blue Diamond closed her eyes, and when she opened them again she was not in her control room, in front of her colony’s design interface. Instead, she was in an endless void of _nothing_. She stood from a throne that no longer existed, and looked around. As she watched, the nothing filled with points of white light. The stars. The firmament split apart into three sections which took familiar shapes. One was sharp, and had a yellow star in its chest. Another was soft, and had a blue star in its chest. The third was radiant, and had a blindingly white star in its head. Between them was Pink. Just as Blue had last seen her – small, poofy, silly-looking and so incredibly _sad_.

_ “She could not see which way to go / If you did not twinkle so.”_

Blue didn’t care what reason anything else happened for, Pink was there! She could reach out and touch her! So she tried, Blue moved faster than was dignified for a diamond with her hand outstretched to reach Pink. “Pink,” she called out. “I’m here, I’m here, it’s all going to be alright, just come to me and – _no_!” A hand made out of stars and the empty space between them snatched Pink away right as Blue reached her. “Give her back!”

It was the soft figure with the blue star in her chest that held Pink away from Blue. As far above Blue as far as Blue was above an average gem. The soft one shook Pink around like a toy, and the three figures threw their heads back in silent laughter.

Blue tried to call on her powers, the mystic arts she had pioneered, but nothing happened. She tried to leap up to grab Pink, but the soft figure would yank Pink higher than Blue’s hands could reach at the last moment. Tears blinded Blue, so desperate was she to get Pink back.

“Please!” Her plea startled the three figures out of their laughter. “Please, give her back! Take me, instead! Take anything I have! Take everything! Everything for her, **please**!”

They laughed at her again, only this time she could hear it. A million voices all joined together in horrid mockery of Blue’s anguish. Blue’s memory was sharper than any other diamond’s, she knew those voices. She remembered them pleading with _her_, as she shattered them. They had defied the order of the diamonds, they had broken White Diamond’s laws, there was _nothing she could do_ for them; and now they mocked her. When there was nothing she could do for Pink.

_Crack_.

A horrible sound silenced the laughter. Blue saw the soft figure’s vicious grin as Pink vanished from her hand. When she opened it, pieces of pink gemstone fell down onto Blue.

“No.” Blue hastily grabbed the shards. “No, nonono! Pink!” It couldn’t be, she wouldn’t allow it to be! She tried to fit them back together, even as her tears fell onto her hands and obscured the shards. “Pink, come back.”

The three figures threw their heads back in horrid laughter.

_ “Though I know not what you are / Twinkle, twinkle little star.”_

“Come back,” Blue pleaded with Pink’s shards as her legs gave out from under her. In a most un-diamond-like way, her voice cracked as she kept trying to piece Pink together. “Come back...” Blue was surrounded by her water-like aura of vivid blue light as she clenched her hands and slammed them into the ground.

Her aura exploded out from her, banished the three figures which had tormented her, and the firmament they were made from. Suddenly, Blue was in her throne in her diamond base again. Her face was streaked with excessive tears, and her aura flared around her visibly. What had been the cause of those visions?

_ “When the blazing sun is gone / When there nothing shines upon.”_

As she heard her jet singing, she felt some power try to seep through her aura, but she banished it. So that’s what that was. Sorrow was replaced with cold fury as she stood from her throne and walked to where Jet and Pearl had been practicing.

Her jet smiled up at her, but Blue was in _no mood_ to be soothed by his similarity to Pink. She reached down and snatched him from the ground in her hand, and held her up to her face. “You,” she hissed dangerously, “are never to do that again.”

He was confused and afraid. He’d never seen Blue Diamond angry before, he had enjoyed a privileged position before. “But I thought you wanted me to sing?”

“I don’t _care_ what you thought I wanted, I’m telling you what I want _now_.” Dangerously angry, she squeezed him ever-so-slightly. “Do I need to repeat myself?”

“No,” Jet cringed back from her, clearly on the verge of crying himself. “I don’t understand what I did wrong, my diamond – “

“You don’t _need_ to understand!” Blue Diamond hadn’t shouted in centuries. The sound of it shook Pearl from her insensate state. “I am your diamond, I have given you my orders! In fact...” Blue Diamond narrowed her eyes at the terrified Jet. “Until I say otherwise, you are forbidden from making _any_ noise. Is that clear?”

Jet tried to talk, but nothing came from his mouth. He was surprised by this, clearly, and didn’t comprehend how it had happened. Blue did, however. Diamonds had _power_ over their gems, geas was one such power. Without words to convey his understanding, Jet could only nod his acceptance of Blue’s orders.

“Good.” Blue’s last bits of rage made her cast Jet to the ground like an unwanted toy as she walked back to her throne. She didn’t look back at Jet who had landed badly. She didn’t see the way his leg was bent slightly more than was normally possible, or how he had begun to weep in silence from the physical and emotional pain. For that moment in time, Blue didn’t _care_.

But she didn’t stop Pearl from rushing in to help the hybrid either. She was more focused on forgetting the horrible vision she had seen and getting back to work. It didn’t work, and mere minutes later she was a sobbing wreck in her throne all over again.

–

Jet wouldn’t play with Pearl anymore. Pearl had accessed the records on organics and followed procedure to let the hybrid’s organic half begin self-repair, which involved shoving the damaged internal structures back together and securing it in the correct alignment with an exterior brace. Short of calling on an amber – which could not be done without Blue Diamond’s permission, there was nothing to do but wait.

Pearl had thought ‘perhaps play will help the time pass faster’ for Jet, but the hybrid wouldn’t respond to her. In fact he cringed away from her every time she went to touch him. That made the feeding, bathing, and lavatory duties she had in his care _difficult_ to say the least. All the fossil seemed capable of doing was sitting on his cushion, eating _significantly_ less than his routine demanded, and refusing to play.

It began to worry Pearl. Without play, humans would go insane. It was stated as fact in Pink Diamond’s notes. All the progress that Blue Diamond had made away from her grief had been reversed. Her diamond could barely work for a day without an emotional breakdown; the majority of the colonization efforts had to be managed by her aquamarines.

Pearl didn’t know what to do.

She knew she had to do _something_ when Jet started to lose mass. It meant his body was entering a starvation period, where it was in need of more resources than it had provided. But Jet wouldn’t eat. So she did what she would normally not do, and approached her diamond.

“My diamond,” Pearl dolefully called while she saluted.

The weeping matriarch turned in her throne to regard her.

“Your Jet is in need of maintenance. I don’t know how to fix what is damaged. What should I do?” She remained still as she waited for her diamond’s reply. All around her, teardrops almost as large as she fell but she remained in position.

Blue Diamond sighed, mournfully, and closed her eyes. “Bring him to me.”

Pearl bowed, and walked backward out of Blue Diamond’s splash zone. Then she gracefully made her way to Jet’s cushion, bubbled him, and brought him to Blue Diamond. As they approached the giant woman, Jet became visibly agitated and tried to get out of the bubble. Specifically, he tried to get _away_ from Blue Diamond – more fervently as they grew closer.

Blue Diamond took Pearl’s bubble in her hand, and lifted Jet up to her eye level. She watched as Jet literally cowered before her in abject terror, and wept more.

Pearl couldn’t tell if she genuinely felt remorse for what she’d done, or if her sorrowful mood hadn’t abated yet.

“Jet,” her diamond said, “I’m sorry for how angry I got. I wish I could say I was better at controlling my emotions, but I’m not.” She looked at the fossil with sorrowful eyes. “I lift my geas, you can make noise again. But my order stands – no singing ever again.” With a minor flex of her fingers, Blue popped Pearl’s bubble and held Jet directly in her hand. “There. Better?”

Jet was timid a moment before he opened his mouth and breathed deep. His gasping breath made noise, and the return of such ability made him happy. He crawled over and hugged Blue Diamond’s thumb.

Though Pearl noticed, he didn’t hug it as hard as he’d done before.

Blue Diamond seemingly didn’t notice, and smiled despite her tears. “Alright. Now get back to eating your food. You’re the only jet I have – I’d rather not lose you.” She lowered Jet to the floor, where Pearl bubbled him again and carried him back to his cushion. His leg was still damaged, and he still would be unable to walk.

Pearl had learned long ago that what a person said mattered ever-so-slightly less than what they didn’t say. Perhaps Jet hadn’t picked up on the implications in Blue Diamond’s apology, but Pearl did. She couldn’t help but feel like this would become a regular occurrence. Like how it had been for Pink Diamond.

–

Holly-Blue Agate found herself in a more chipper mood as the zoo became more popular a location for gems across the empire. Sure, they were there mostly to take notes on the construction of other zoos, but she was in charge of the facility. Barring orders from Blue Diamond otherwise, she was ultimately in charge of everything that went on. All these guests, even those of higher classes than she, had to listen to her. She gloated to herself internally, and plied sweet manipulation externally so that they never had to see her whip come out.

An agate needed to command with and without the whip in equal measure.

Even the hessonites who would command the new zoos had to heed her advice on human care and hybrid production. She had been so positively _gleeful_ to make high and mighty ‘clarity’ gems sit through a presentation about human reproduction and how it related to hybrids. They’d been so ill at ease, but not Holly-Blue! Holly-Blue had put in her hours of slogging through Pink Diamond’s process, and now _she_ was the expert! A mere agate in charge of what had been a backwater outpost, an expert on gem production.

Her hybrids were a delight to work with, not nearly as roudy as the Earth-grown clods among her troops. They listened, they were always happy to see her, they did exactly as they were told, they punched amethysts so hard that they skipped along the surface of the containment area lake like skipping stone…

Something in her train of thought made Holly-Blue stop mid step, but she had to stop and rethink her thoughts before she realized what. Hastily she turned back to the viewing window she had passed which let her look into the containment area. There she saw amethyst guards quartz-rolling at her precious hybrids with weapons drawn. The poor pseudo-gems looked so afraid they only fought back out of desperation.

In what felt like moments, she was at the access door then in the containment area herself. “_What is the meaning of this?!_” She shouted while an amethyst guard was punched almost vertically into the air. Oh this was awful, Holly-Blue thought as she advanced on the scene. All of the hybrids involved were fossils, agatized bone, so they weren’t in danger from mere amethysts. But did _they_ know that? “Stop this at once, I’ll have all of you on toe nail clipping duty for _years_ for this – “

Holly-Blue was stopped by a gem destabilizer being brandished in her face. The forked green metal poles with distinctly yellow lightning between them would have dispersed her form with a touch. The hand which held it was a massive slab of quartz – a jasper from her banded coloring. As Holly-Blue got a better look at her, she realized the jasper was _the_ Jasper. The legendary warrior from the rebellion. Her utterly massive mane of hair and the gem in place of her nose were telltale signs.

“Hold, agate,” Jasper growled as she continued to hold the destabilizer in Holly-Blue’s face. “Orders from Yellow Diamond are to toughen these lesser agates up. Get them worked into proper quartz soldiers.” She looked back at the amethysts surrounding the fossils and jerked her chin upward. That seemed to be the sign to resume the attack, as the amethysts began to go after the poor hybrids once more. “They’re strong. But they’re soft. A few days of this will harden them up to where we can begin real training.”

“They can’t go for days on end of activity!” Holly-Blue found she cared less and less for the possibility of being poofed in light of this new information. “They have strict care requirements that need to be met.”

“Tough. The diamond’s orders are absolute.”

“Blue Diamond charged me to care for these worthless animals and finish Pink Diamond’s work, and now you’re going to _ruin_ a whole batch of actually _valuable_ humans!” Holly-Blue watched in horror as an amethyst’s gem-weapon came dangerously close to hurting her display model fossil, which she had presented to Blue Diamond, and her frustration became too much to bear. “Slag your orders! And slag Yellow Diamond!”

The amethysts stopped, turned and looked in horror at what Holly-Blue had said. Jasper turned and looked at her in shock at what Holly-Blue had said. Holly-Blue had her hands clasped over her mouth in shock at what she had said. She hadn’t meant to say that. She shouldn’t have said that. That was meant to be something she kept locked up in her thoughts, but never _ever_ give voice to.

And her troops had heard. The fossils had heard. There was no turning back anymore. The only path forward was to _double-down_.

Holly-Blue took a deep breath then gracefully side-stepped the gem destabilizer, Jasper was too stunned to resist, and brought her elbow down on Jasper’s wrist. The weapon landed in the grass and fizzled to inactivity. Then she swiftly brought her knee up into the Jasper’s abdomen.

Jaspers were tough, _the_ Jasper moreso, but agates were every bit as strong as any quartz soldier. And Holly-Blue was motivated beyond all reason in that moment. Jasper doubled over and let out a gasp of shock.

Holly-Blue Agate kept on the offense, and laid into Jasper with a punch right next to her gemstone, then again on the other side. Finally she interlocked her hands together and brought them both down on the back of Jasper’s head, to drive her into the dirt. Whereupon she proceeded to stomp on the legendary soldier’s head.

“This is not Yellow Diamond’s zoo. This is Pink Diamond’s zoo administrated by _Blue Diamond’s_ trusted agate: Me. Blue Diamond left strict orders, and no one short of _White Diamond_ can countermand them!” Every stomp drove Jasper’s head deeper into the ground. “So either give White Diamond a call, get off my station, or get in line, soldier!” Holly-Blue stopped her stomping to glare at the stunned amethysts. “Well?! Whose orders matter more to you?! The diamond who gave you purpose again, or the one who would’ve had you all shattered?!”

As one the amethysts dispelled their weapons and backed away from the fossils.

Under Holly-Blue’s boots, Jasper turned her head enough to look up at the agate in shock. Perhaps no agate before her had dared get physical with the _perfect_ quartz. Well, now Jasper knew better.

“As for you,” Holly-Blue hissed. “You’re here as a guest. Your presence here is through the grace of Blue Diamond. Don’t step out of line again, or I’ll throw you off this station myself.” Holly-Blue looked around and saw that most of the forested part of the containment area was badly damaged. The other fossil gems were, hopefully, on the other side of the lake where they wouldn’t have heard or seen the display. “And clean this mess up! Training is done in the facility proper, not the containment area!”

“Yes, Holly-Blue,” the amethysts muttered.

Jasper stood up after the agate took her foot off. The two quartzes shared an odd look, as the perfect soldier faced off with an average commander. However, Jasper blinked first, and saluted Holly-Blue. “Yes, agate,” she muttered, and then went to work fixing a toppled tree.

As soon as Holly-Blue heard the door to the containment area close behind her when she left, she became a nervous wreck as she asked herself what had come over her to do something so _stupid_.

Meanwhile inside, all the amethysts could talk about was how cool Holly-Blue had been. All the fossils could think of was how Holly-Blue had come to their rescue. And all Jasper could think about was the strange feeling she couldn’t repress that she had felt when she met Holly-Blue’s defiant eyes – it was like when she had looked into Rose Quartz’s eyes.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five – Concessions**

Things didn’t go back to how they used to be in Blue Diamond’s control room. Even with Jet’s sanction partially lifted, he refused to play with Pearl. When Blue Diamond reached for him he cringed away from her like she was going to hit him. And worst of all, he didn’t smile anymore. Blue Diamond hadn’t realized how desperately she needed his smile until it was gone, seemingly forever. Once his leg healed, he returned to his lessons with Pearl but would always treat it as a break from his routine of doing nothing.

Sometimes, before he went to sleep, Blue Diamond could swear she heard him crying – but what would he have to cry about? Perhaps his leg caused him pain? Blue had seen in Pink’s files that some injuries continued to cause pain for years after they’d healed, though she had never gotten close enough to one to know why.

After she had set her lapis gems to terraforming the initial colonization site for the warp pad hub, she saw Jet languishing on his cushion and decided to get to the bottom of the issue. “Pearl, bring me my jet.”

The servant gem gracefully stepped over and encased Jet in a white-blue bubble and brought him over. Even inside the bubble, Jet tried to get as far from Blue Diamond as he could. This proved useless as Blue Diamond picked up the bubble and brought it up to her face.

“Why do you continue to refuse your play periods? Why do you cringe away from me? Why do I hear you cry before sleep? As your diamond, I command you to answer.” As soon as Jet’s eyes met hers, her geas took effect and Jet was compelled to answer.

He fought it for a few seconds, he frantically tried to keep his mouth shut, but the compulsion was too strong and his will too weak. “Because I’m afraid of you!” He clapped his hands over his mouth to try and stay quiet about the issue, but one hand fought the other to comply with her orders. “I don’t understand why I made you so mad! So I don’t know how to avoid it again! I don’t want you to break my leg again, and I don’t know how to avoid that! I want to sing for you, because that made Pink Diamond happy, but you forbade that!”

Oh. Those simple answers burst the bubble of the ‘imperious tyrant queen’ Blue had been in the midst of putting on. She sighed through her nose and slumped in her throne. “When you say it made Pink happy… are you referring to when your gem was a rose quartz?”

Jet slowly nodded. “Sometimes, when I dream, I dream her memories. She doesn’t have a lot of them, but she remembers what made Pink Diamond happy the most. Pink Diamond loved to hear the rose quartzes sing for her, she loved to talk to them, and she loved asking them their opinions on things.”

Blue couldn’t help but smile a little. Of course Pink would be happy _talking_ to her gems, and asking opinions of support infantry like they were her aristocratic gems.

“She knew each and every one of them by sight,” Jet reclined in the bubble, but did so away from Blue’s fingers. “She could glance at one rose quartz, know immediately who they were, when they emerged, and their last conversation.” As he talked, he saw that Blue’s smile widened, and smiled faintly himself. “She was… very huggy, which I think was because the rose quartzes were almost her size?”

Blue chuckled as pleasant memories rolled through her mind. “No, she was just… huggy. When she wasn’t being silly.” Blue looked at Jet, really _looked_ at him, and saw that even as relaxed as the conversation had become, he was still afraid of her. When she subtly moved her fingers he would jump a little. How odd, it seemed, that she even _cared_ enough to ask one of her gems for the reasons for their behavior. How odd, it seemed, that one of her gems being afraid of her seemed _bad_. She remembered how Pink had _adored_ her rose quartzes. She would brag about them to Yellow and Blue whenever she could.

And then everything went… horribly wrong. An entire cut of gem ruined by the actions of one. Blue closed her eyes and sighed. She couldn’t _afford_ to make Pink’s mistake again.

“I got angry because you used your power on me, without permission.” The part of her that was the cold tyrant objected to an explanation of any kind, while the part of her that loved Pink and all Pink had done said it was good to explain. “And I forbade you singing because it didn’t look like you could control your power at all.” She looked at Jet and she saw a vision of Pink again, which brought tears to Blue’s face. “But… if you can learn control, to sing without using your power, I will allow it.”

Jet’s face immediately brightened, and Blue smiled at that. She paused to consider where it could be done that wouldn’t be harmful to colonization efforts. An idea struck her. “The atmosphere on the moon is breathable for humans. At this latitude it might be a bit chilly for you, but you can still practice your singing out in the forest. I’ll have a robonoid follow you to guide you back when your play period is done.”

Jet’s smile drooped just a little, and he tilted his head. “How will I know when I can control it?”

“Like all gems, your powers are tied to your mind, and your emotions. With practice and conscious effort, you will gain control. It shouldn’t take long – a couple years at most.” Blue Diamond tried to look reassuring. “You’re clever, you’ve picked up on Pearl’s lessons quickly for a human. This won’t be a bother at all.”

Jet’s confidence seemed to come back, and Blue was glad for it.

–

Peridot 5XG enjoyed a privileged position among the other peridots on the research team that not even the Era One peridots enjoyed. The ambers _liked_ her.

Any time one of the ambers was being difficult with an experiment, typically one that required some form of pain as a side effect, the other peridots had to come to _her_ to get them to comply. She would say much the same thing the original peridot had said, but the ambers would be soothed by her presence. Typically, the female had a stronger reaction than the male. Both of them typically just asked her to use her limb-enhancer touch-stubs to secure their hands while the experiment went on and they would comply. Peridot understood, they were made partially of automatic response systems that might have damaged valuable equipment or hurt the peridots if their hand remained unsecured.

As for teaching them advanced vocabulary, it required more work than she had originally thought. One definition would require a detailed explanation of what the thing being defined _was_ because otherwise the ambers didn’t connect the points of data. Other peridots on the team snickered at her when she did the explanations, but they still had to come to her for help when the ambers wouldn’t cooperate.

That all changed on log date Five Four One Three. Peridot was across the room, in the midst of examining a healed citrine to see if her mystographical information differed from an undamaged citrine when she heard it.

“It’s not making sense because you did it wrong.”

The whole work area went dead silent. Peridot abandoned her examination to look over at what had transpired. The female amber, Eye-Five, looked over the shoulder of an Era One peridot who was trying to mathematically solve the question of how an amber healed a gem. From the red outlines around the display, Peridot could tell it had returned a ‘does not compute’ solution.

“Excuse me,” the Era One peridot hissed, “but I think you’ll find I have a better understanding of how these numbers work than – “

Eye-Five ignored her and tapped on the screen. “You have all the right numbers, but you have them in the wrong places. Probably because you’re using the rose quartz healing method as a model.” With deft hands, she encircled certain figures and moved them about the solution. “I’m not a rose quartz, and you need to factor that in. Stop assuming that the problem already exists in the system and – there you go.” Eye-Five set the figures to run in an entirely new configuration and ignored the peridot’s squawking as she hit the ‘run program’ button.

Moments later, the display brought up a green-bordered solution to the mathematical problem.

Rather than gloat, Eye-Five skipped away and climbed up into the pseudo-tree for cuddles with En-Seven. Meanwhile all the other peridots, including Peridot, gathered around the display to look over the solution that had been reached. The Era One peridot which had been doing the experiment had been locked into a loop of gritting teeth, shaking, and making ‘gh’ sounds.

As one, all the peridots turned to glare at Peridot when they couldn’t find any fault with the logic Eye-Five had used. “Wha – I didn’t teach her to do that!” Peridot defended herself.

“Well then – who did?” Another Era Two peridot groused and crossed her limb-enhancers across her torso. “You’re the only one who’s done any teaching with them.”

“I taught them _linguistics_! Basic vocabulary so they could understand what we wanted them to do!” Suddenly the subject of her coworker’s judgement, Peridot started sweating and scrambling for a way out. “None of you had a problem when I helped them learn how to _talk_!”

“None of that explains this,” a third peridot growled. “_How_ did a defective gem learn enough higher mathematics to _correct_ our work?”

The initial Era One peridot continued to remain in shock.

“Maybe the results will tell us something,” a fourth peridot calmly ventured. She continued to glare at Peridot as she advanced through the crowd to look at the results. “This data indicates time manipulation is strongly involved,” she said and tapped her chin with her limb-enhancer touch-stubs. “Is everyone’s chronometer functioning correctly?”

“Mine has been spotty every time we do an experiment.” “I got mine smashed by that bismuth the ambers fixed, and haven’t gotten a chance to do repairs.” “I never needed mine, so I didn’t finish installing it.”

The general consensus was ‘no’.

“So we need external confirmation,” the quiet peridot confirmed, and tapped her limb-enhancer. “Bridge, this is the work station. Could we get an update on the time remaining for our project?”

The smooth voice of the sapphire overseeing the project replied. “Let’s cut to the end of a pointless series of questions. The amber’s time manipulation has put you three weeks out of sync with the universe outside your work station. I’ve made Yellow Diamond aware of this, and she has increased your budgeted time.”

“Thank you. Work station, out.” The quiet peridot shrugged and looked around. “So, we’re out of sync, but it doesn’t explain how this has happened.”

Peridot was once more the target of her fellows, and decided to fix this by demanding answers of the source. She stomped her way over to the amber’s tree and called up. “Hey!” En-Seven and Eye-Five looked up from their snuggling and then down to her. “How did you clods learn to fix that problem?”

“We watched, we listened,” the ambers said together. En-Seven even had the gall to arch his eyebrow at Peridot.

That simple answer threw a rock into Peridots mental gears, and stopped her outrage for a moment. “You… watched? You listened?” When they nodded, Peridot felt one of her eyes twitch. “You mean to tell me you learned higher level mathematics from simple _observation_?!”

“Yes,” they answered in unison again. “It wasn’t hard,” Eye-five added with a smile. “Once you know how to do the formulas, everything snaps together.”

“I’m better with the stuff that deals with shapes,” En-Seven added in a stage whisper. “But she’s better with the big walls of numbers.”

“Oh, that’s. That’s… swell.” Peridot didn’t know how to respond to that. Instead, she turned and walked back to the group, stunned. “They learned it from watching us.”

The general consensus among the peridots was that Peridot must have misunderstood. So additional peridots went over to the ambers to ask the question. Each time, the questioner would come back as stunned as Peridot had been.

“Hey,” one of the ruby guards who protected the ambers offered with a cheerful smile. “At least you guys won’t lose your role to these things.” Her smile became visibly hollow and bitter. “Like we did.” Then she snapped back into genuine cheer. “Because Blue Diamond doesn’t have any peridots. As long as Yellow Diamond doesn’t want any ambers of her own, you’ll be fine!”

Peridot processed that information and found she could stand up slightly taller afterward. “That actually helps a lot. Thank you.”

“No problem!” The ruby waved her off. “Anything to spare a gem the horror of realizing that the role you were given when you were created was cruelly ripped away by the advancement of gemkind!”

A solid minute of silence resulted as the twenty peridots stared at the – obviously very old – ruby. “Are you okay?”

The ruby laughed, and smiled again. “No!”

–

“_Come all you pretty fair maids, whomever you may be / Who loves a jolly sailor bold, who ploughs the raging sea,_” sang the ammonite as she led about fifty wild humans out of the roaming eye and towards the assimilation bay.

Jasper had to admit: Holly-Blue Agate was good at making monsters. The ammonite female was almost as tall as a quartz soldier, with a dark yet radiant skin tone, and hair that trailed down almost to the floor. Her gemstone, spiraled and glowing from active use, was set into her shoulder, and produced a haunting melody that flowed with the opal’s hypnotic song.

Jasper watched in sick fascination as the ammonite stood next to the assimilation bay door while humans were fed into the conveyor. Her hypnosis would wear off halfway down the line – Jasper knew from the rebellion the exact limits of opal hypnotic power. Jasper almost pitied the humans who would come to their senses in the midst of being processed. But life on the zoo was better than anything they had on Earth.

After the last humans were loaded in, the amethysts which had accompanied the ammonite piled on the praise and compliments.

“Great work, Ehs-Three!” “Fifty humans! All at once!” “You had them practically eating out of your hand!”

The human-gem monster flourished under all the praise, but quickly snapped to a salute alongside the proper gems when Holly-Blue Agate advanced on her.

“Ammonite,” the agate said, crisp and commanding. “Report!”

“Yes, Holly-Blue,” the human, ‘Ehs-Three’, started with her soothing, gentle voice. “We departed from the station and 8XK instructed me in the emergency operation of the Roaming Eye, per protocol I was unaware of.”

Holly-Blue turned to the relevant amethyst and squinted. “Is that so?”

The amethyst nodded, and Holly-Blue clicked her tongue against her teeth.

“Continue.”

“Yes, Holly-Blue. We arrived on Earth in the region of the communication hub. Some humans had made shelters near the hub, so we watched them to ensure they were not in the midst of some infectious disease.”

“Good, good,” Holly-Blue nodded.

“When it was determined that the humans were suitably healthy, I was sent in with 8XO shapeshifted into the form of a bird to watch me. The humans were a bit aggressive, but fell under my spell without difficulty. I was able to use my spell to send them to sleep any time I needed to rest my voice, and we returned without incident. Report completed.”

Holly-Blue then took the report of the amethysts while Jasper watched. At least the ammonites wouldn’t need instruction in how to obey their agates. It would just be a pain to get those ‘fossils’ to act like agates. However, what surprised Jasper was how Holly-Blue acted after the reports had been delivered.

She immediately was all smiles and warmth for the ammonite. “Ah! Fifty humans! Some children and pregnant females even! A whole settlement all at once – oh, I’m so proud of you Ehs-Three!” In some strange ritual, Holly-Blue held the human’s face in her hands, and squished her cheeks together to shake her head. “Who’s a good human? Who’s a good human?”

“Hee!” The ammonite said around the squishing of her face. “I am! Me!”

“Yes you are!” Holly-Blue gushed and stroked the human’s hair lovingly. She stepped back and was suddenly all seriousness when she talked to the amethysts. “Take Ehs-Three through the delousing bay, and get her in position with the other ammonites to keep those wild animals in check. We’re expecting three new ambers today, and I won’t have their mothers under undeserved stress.”

“Yes, Holly-Blue,” the soldiers responded in unison and marched alongside the hybrid. As soon as they were out of Holly-Blue’s direct line of sight, Jasper saw the gems and human go right back to playing.

If Jasper had a stomach it would turn. Didn’t they realize how easily that ammonite could turn her powers on _them_?

Holly-Blue sharply turned to glare at Jasper, unconcerned with the differences in their height. “See? That’s how you get results from a hybrid. Reward the behavior you want.”

“That was sickening,” Jasper growled.

“And effective.” The agate was clearly pleased with herself, and held her hand up to her chest. “My fossils are the most well-behaved gems short of White Diamond’s court.” As quickly as her good mood appeared, it vanished with a malevolent glare. “And all without _almost ruining_ them.”

“Yellow Diamond expects those opals and those agates to _be_ opals and agates,” Jasper growled in return. “Not to be well-behaved pets!”

“I don’t think Yellow Diamond really knows what she’s asking for then,” Holly-Blue fired back with an arched brow. “We’re all the diamond’s pets. They use us until we do something they don’t like, then we’re gone.”

Jasper wanted to refute what she’d heard. She was a soldier, not a pet! But then she remembered how she was expected to drop everything and come just because Yellow Diamond called. At least she had it better than a pearl would – a pet was better than being a _decoration_.

Suddenly the agate was all smiles. “But don’t fret! I know the exact way we can teach them some aggression without damaging them too much.” She turned on her heel to march down the hall to a door. A seldom-used door from the amount of dust on it. Inside, Jasper was presented with rows of spears, hundreds of shields in kite and buckler style, and racks upon racks of different sort of blades. “An agate is well known for her whip. And fossils respond best when they know what is expected of them when. So we’ll train them to only show aggression when they’ve a weapon in their hands. It also allows us to train them toward summoning their gem weapons, wouldn’t you think?”

The perfect quartz smirked, walked past the agate and picked up a weapon in a style she found familiar. A massive two-handed ax like what she’d carried into battle against Rose Quartz. “They’re going to get damaged this way too, you realize?”

“But of course,” Holly-Blue said as she too strode in and picked up a weapon. A long, narrow saber with two cutting edges, a narrow tip, and a handguard to protect her fingers. That style of weapon was familiar to Jasper too – Rose Quartz’s terrifying combat pearl used that style. “But this way they’ll be damaged _less_, and not damaged in a way an amber can’t fix.”

So Holly-Blue was okay with the agates fighting so long as they had a weapon too? Jasper could live with that. What Holly-Blue didn’t seem to consider was that training aggression didn’t work how she thought it did – putting a weapon into a person’s hands and getting them angry didn’t make them less angry when they put the weapon down. Jasper had been there, she’d lived through that. All it did for her was made her angry enough to use her fists. Holly-Blue thought she’d tricked Jasper, but she’d just tricked herself.

Maybe, if Jasper was clever about it, she could ax the gem-eating monsters before they had a chance to eat her.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter Six – Progress**

Eudoxia knew this would happen. She knew that living so close to a God’s House would be trouble. Either the gods would grow displeased and send a horrible monster to destroy them, or mere proximity to the House would kill them. She’d told Demetria they shouldn’t live there – but the men of Rome wouldn’t come near the House. It was safe, Demetria had said. Safer than being anywhere close to Romans.

Well, now they were dead!

A witch had come into the village and struck them all dead, which they found out as they were ushered through the path to the underworld. Eudoxia hadn’t expected her whole village to wind up in the Elysian Fields, but the gods were merciful when they cared to be.

Eudoxia was the village huntress, alone since Demetria had run afoul of a boar. It had been her job to train children how to find food in the forests, how to prepare their hides for the tanner, and how to offer portions of the kill to the gods. She was a heavily scarred woman from years in that work, and had shaved her hair close to her head so it wouldn’t get caught in the brush. All traits worthless in paradise.

Paradise took the shape of a verdant forest, with a massive lake, and a little voice that whispered into her ear what the gods willed her to do. Strangely enough she found the little voice highly agreeable, even as it told her to do the same activities day in, and day out. For a week, her village kept mostly to the forest near what was assumed to be the eastern shore. A simalcrum of the sun crossed the sky every day and became the moon halfway through, so they assumed the direction it rose from to be east. 

There was no game in the forest, there were no herbs to gather – all the plants were just bushes and trees which would sprout flowers and fruit at fixed times of the day. There were no insects, no birds, no fish. It was like the only truly living things there were the people.

That concerned Eudoxia, for there were pregnant women and children among them. Would they be forced to endure those states forever? Would the gods deign to speak to them? What would they do with their lives without texts, or homes, or _a future_? Malaise spread quickly among the people, and Eudoxia could only watch helplessly.

Then, one day when she ventured away from the villagers in the hopes the gods would grant her something to hunt, she came across more people. Not from her village, but obviously not Romans. A variety of skin tones and hair colors – which she had never seen outside of big cities. The main difference was that the majority of them had green or blue eyes. The strangers didn’t see her as a threat, and merely waved at her in greeting. Neither did they seem fearful or alarmed when Eudoxia approached them. Were they fools? A warrior covered in scars advanced on them and they seemed unconcerned!

A dark skinned woman with her head shaved close like Eudoxia patted the ground next to her, a clear invitation. Stunned and confused, Eudoxia complied while she tried to process what all this meant. While she did, the other people plucked beautiful flowers from around them and passed them to the dark skinned woman.

They dressed in the same way as the villagers had found themselves – a blue vest, a long white loincloth that wrapped around their chests from the breasts down, brown belts, and strange earrings which would whisper to them.

“Hello brother,” the dark skinned woman said with a beautiful smile. “I’m Ay-Nine, I’m so happy that I get to welcome you home.” She wove the stems of the flowers into a ring as Eudoxia watched, deft in her craft.

Eudoxia recoiled a little, the villagers had known her well enough to know she was not a man though she appeared as such, but these were strangers. “Um. Sister. I may look the part of a man, but I’m your… sister. And I’m Eudoxia. Have you been dead long?”

The strangers and Ay-Nine looked at her curious, and then at each other. “No. I was born here. We all were. I’m sorry I called you brother, sister Eud-oxia, I’ll make sure no one makes that mistake when they meet you.” She had a strange way of names, Ay-Nine, she broke it up into two distinct syllables like her own name. Finally she was done, and offered the completed flower crown to the huntress. “Welcome home, sister!”

“The gods allow people who’ve died here to have children?” She’d never heard that in the stories. But, Eudoxia supposed, people wouldn’t stop the act of creating children. She’d been told it was fun. “I guess that explains why the gods allowed the pregnant women to remain so.” With trepidation, she took the crown and placed it on her head. She’d been the brutal warrior who killed beasts for her people, she forgot how it felt to just be pretty. Demetria would poke such fun at her.

“You have a funny name for gems, Eud-oxia,” Ay-Nine laughed. “If your choosened women find the bearing hurtful, bring them to us. We are ambers, we can undo the hurt.”

“Ambers?”

Each of the strangers twisted and turned to show Eudoxia a polished surface on their body – golden yellow in color with bubbles frozen in place within. Ay-Nine’s was on the palm of her hand. “We are new gems, our diamond has not said what our role will be yet, but Holly-Blue Agate says she thinks our healing power is important.”

Realization dawned on Eudoxia. Demigods. She was seated among demigods. The words were different, but if she replaced ‘gems’ with ‘gods’ and ‘diamond’ with ‘Hades’ it all snapped into place. These were Hades’ children by Persephone – who was named Holly-Blue Agate in the realm of the gods! Suddenly she remembered stories of the legendary temper of the gods, and horror struck her.

Hastily she backed away and made a sign of prayer to the holy beings. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know who you were – I thought you were mortals, I’ll get back to my people right away – “

“Shhh,” Ay-Nine said and grabbed her hand. “Don’t be afraid. We’re gems and humans at the same time. It’s okay for you to sit with us, talk with us!”

“Depending on what the little voice says,” another female of slightly lighter skin and oddly cut hair added, “you might be choosened with one of us!”

If Eudoxia had the correct idea of what ‘choosened’ was a euphemism for, her response to blush terribly bright was appropriate. What an idea! With a demigod? Her?!

“In time,” Ay-Nine explained as if it would soothe her. “Those that come after you, and those that come after them will become closer and closer to gems. And then one day, it will be! You are already part of our family, and we want to get to know you – so we can love you, and love those who will come after you!”

Eudoxia stumbled over her words at the thought that if she had children they would begin the journey to being demigods in their own right. But she became alarmingly aware that the ambers as a group had gotten closer to her, all smiles and curious eyes.

“You are covered with old hurts,” a male amber told her. “Could you tell us how you got them?”

The huntress looked down at herself, and her cornucopia of scar tissue on display, and looked around at the semi-divine beings. “It would take a long time to tell the story….”

“We can listen to as much or as little as you’d like to tell us,” Ay-Nine said and rubbed the hand of Eudoxia’s she held. “The routine won’t start for many hours.”

“Well… okay, the short versions,” Eudoxia decided as she settled down. She looked awkwardly around at the ambers and held up her hand to show the crisscrossing scars on her knuckles. “I got these from my neighbor’s house cat when I was young. I caught him picking a fight with our cat, and got in the middle of it….”

–

The sounds of metal on metal echoed through the zoo’s training region. Amethysts and Beta Kindergarten quartzes stood on the side as a legend crossed blades with a commander. Seated on the floor, in wondrous awe, were the extant adult fossils onboard the zoo. All twenty-two agatized bones, ambers, and ammonites.

Yellow Diamond’s agate which commanded the peridots aboard the zoo brandished a narrow sword with little ornamentation and a wide guard, while Jasper wielded a heavy two-handed ax. Despite the differences in their height and weapons, the two quartzes were able to lock attacks regularly.

A sudden clapping noise ended the duel, and Holly-Blue Agate stepped into the arena behind the combatants. Behind her was a waify figure, thinner even than the humans with a light blue uniform, a lace mantle in mimicry of Holly-Blue’s, and a perfectly round gemstone set into her head – Holly-Blue’s pearl had finally arrived.

“Most fights will not take this long,” Holly-Blue groused as she marched in front of her hybrids. “Most will be over in seconds. It is acceptable for fights here to take longer as you’re expected to learn, or to teach.” The last half of her statement was directed venomously at the other Earth-made quartzes in the room. “Let’s start with some observations – who can tell me why Sagenite Agate was able to fend off Jasper’s weapon despite the differences in mass?” She looked over the many raised hands among the proper gems and focused exclusively on the hybrids. Holly-Blue’s face lit up like a star when one red-haired male raised his hand. “Yes, Gee-Three?”

“The ax is heavier,” the human-gem hybrid slowly spoke while all eyes were on him. “It takes a lot of energy to move. If she put too much in and missed, all that energy would be wasted. So she held back.”

Jasper scoffed behind Holly-Blue and was completely ignored.

“A good answer, Gee-Three, carefully spending your effort on attacks that you know will connect is important.” Holly-Blue clapped her hands together and smiled cheerfully. “But it’s also not the complete picture. Jasper, would you like to provide some insight?”

The legendary quartz glared at Holly-Blue’s back and grit her teeth. Through her clenching she answered. “If I missed, I’d be open to a counter-attack. I need to hit her center-mass to poof her with my ax, she just needs to stab me in the right spot.”

A collective ‘oh’ was spoken by the observing hybrids.

“Now then,” Holly-Blue clapped her hands and her pearl produced a saber from her gem’s storage space which Holly-Blue took in her hand. “We’ll start with basic swordplay, and move on to other weapon styles. Bare-fist fighting will be one of the last things we cover. Everyone, line up for your training swords.”

As anyone could have expected, giving training swords to those who had never held a weapon before – nor had the concept of what a weapon _was_ – did not end well. A few of the humans got poked hard, some got smacked and bruised, one had their eye damaged. Fortunately, ambers could heal all those things, even on each other. But for Holly-Blue it was a stressful experience to go through especially because she couldn’t intervene. Sagenite Agate was given command of the fossils’ training for matters of impartiality, and she was a rigid taskmaster as an agate should be.

Jasper took pleasure in flaunting Holly-Blue’s inability to shield her precious hybrids from harm by being _slightly_ rougher with the hybrids than the other Earth-made quartzes were. Sagenite Agate never saw an issue, so Holly-Blue could only watch and seethe.

Holly-Blue scoured her memories of Pink Diamond’s notes to find a way to turn the tides in her hybrid’s favor. Something, anything to give them a better start than what she’d seen. When the first lesson was concluded as a resounding failure, she retired to her quarters and looked over the notes directly for something she’d missed.

As it turned out, she had failed to look into Pink Diamond’s notes on human culture. It was the most incomplete region of her notes, as she’d started it shortly before Rose Quartz happened. She’d only gotten around to studying a few civilizations, and even then not very much. But there were a few common threads for Holly-Blue to put together.

During the time between the first training session and the second, Holly-Blue and her pearl went among the humans to tell them about the diamonds. They already had a vague idea of who and what the diamonds were – but Holly-Blue told them the story of the people who were their diamonds. Her three display models were encouraged to tell the others what they knew about Blue Diamond from their meeting – her constant emotional pain resonated with the ambers the most, who desperately wished to help her with her ‘hurt’.

Her ammonites seemed to grow somber at the thought of Pink Diamond, but Holly-Blue didn’t know what to make of that. The agatized bones however, seemed driven by the knowledge that Yellow Diamond commanded Homeworld’s armies, and wanted to please her with their strength. Holly-Blue had thought things had gone well, until one of her agatized bones hesitantly approached her as she was leaving the containment area.

“Ehm-One, what’s the matter?” Holly-Blue immediately saw that the hybrid was near crying, and had her pearl produce a segment of cloth to dry the fellow agate’s eyes. “Come now, you can tell Holly-Blue anything.”

After some coaxing, the dark-skinned agate explained the situation. “I… think Yellow Diamond is mad at me. She asked to see me when she was here, and… and….” The poor girl finally broke down crying, and had to lean on Holly-Blue.

“There, there, sweetie. Let it all out.” In a moment of softness that would never be experienced by anyone but a fossil, Holly-Blue embraced the poor girl. “Yellow Diamond is demanding. But that is because she sees who you will be at the end of all this training, and expected to see it then.” Holly-Blue didn’t believe a word of what she had said, but she said it to calm down the crying human. “I know it hurts, that she doesn’t believe that you will get there. But I believe in you. So does Blue Diamond. Let Yellow Diamond be mad at you all she wants, you weren’t made for her.”

When Ehm-One was calmed down, and Holly-Blue could leave the containment area properly, she found herself the subject of Jasper’s glare once again.

“What is it now, soldier?” Holly-Blue’s sweet tone did a complete shift, into a coy tone to mask her annoyance. “Getting angry on your diamond’s behalf again?”

Jasper’s eyes narrowed. “Yellow isn’t my diamond. And you can’t just explain away a diamond’s wrath like that.”

“Why not?” Holly-Blue arched a brow. “We both know how Yellow feels about organics, but they don’t. They don’t need to. And by the time they figure it out they’ll be strong enough to take it in stride.”

Jasper’s glare became confused. “How can you do that? How can you just… allow them to shrug off a diamond’s scorn?”

“It helps that she’s not _my_ diamond.”

The station shook as Jasper’s hand lashed out and punched a crater into a pink flower decal in the wall next to the containment area door. “She’s not my diamond either!”

“Is that right?” Holly-Blue advanced on Jasper with a smirk. “I can’t help but wonder. If Pink were around to see you as you are – would she even recognize you as hers?”

A dangerous glint shined in Jasper’s eye, and Holly-Blue narrowly dodged a grab attempt on her head via a backstep.

“Ah, you’ve thought about that as well.” Holly-Blue’s smirk became even more pronounced. “Each diamond has a set of traits they desire their gems to have. Blue favors adaptability. Yellow favors efficiency. I’ve worked with Pink Diamond’s gems for _thousands of years_, and I can tell you don’t have the traits Pink wanted for her gems.”

The dangerous glint in Jasper’s eyes was revealed for what it was – a reaction to knowledge she already knew. A layer of outrage over a deep pit of _shame_.

“Pink Diamond wanted her gems to have joy in their hearts. But you? You’re full of fear for _them_,” Holly-Blue flicked her hand toward the containment area, “and a desperate desire to fit in with Yellow’s crowd. You _want_ Yellow to be your diamond.”

“Shut up,” Jasper croaked.

“Because, as far as Pink’s gems are concerned, you’re an _off-color_ every bit as hideous as someone who came out misshapen.”

“Shut up!” Jasper clutched the sides of her head, as if she wanted to squeeze the agate’s words out of her mind. When Jasper looked at her again, her eyes were full of rage. With a twinge of magic, the quartz soldier’s weapon emerged from her gem – a crash helmet designed in the image of a powerful pompadour with a visor over her eyes.

“Oh ho ho ho, my,” Holly-Blue laughed into the back of her hand, and looked at the infuriated perfect soldier without fear. Behind her, she could hear the whispers of some of her soldiers as they watched the scene. “Someone’s not very good at hearing the truth.”

Jasper breathed heavily for a moment before she took a deep breath and dispelled her weapon. “Here’s some truth right back at you. Those monsters will never be as good as real gems.”

Holly-Blue’s smile vanished.

“They can’t fit within the order of the diamonds, because as organics they have no place of their own. Only places where they’re tolerated by other, better gems.” Jasper’s eyes were just as full of rage as they’d been a moment ago, but Holly-Blue got the feeling that Jasper didn’t see her there – that the quartz soldier was lost in memories. “And as someone who’s spent a lot of time _being tolerated_, it weighs down on you. They’re not as strong as me, they’ll snap eventually. And when they do, they’ll get good gems ruined. _You_ will have gotten good gems ruined.”

“Then maybe,” Holly-Blue snarled with a dangerous glint of her own in her eyes, “it would be more effective if we worked on making them _stronger_ than you.”

–

Blue Diamond hadn’t expected much when she allowed Jet out on his first jaunt across the moon, but she certainly expected him to come back _presentable_. Instead, when she had gone down to the physical doorway of her diamond base, she saw an utter mess of a human waiting on the other side. His feet were coated in semi-hydrated dirt, his vest and belt were both gone, and instead of wearing his loincloth, he had a much smaller mass of torn white fabric held up to maintain the illusion of modesty. There was plant matter all through his hair – which was missing entire clumps – and the human had the gall to grin up at her.

“What in the universe did you _do_ out there?” The diamond asked as she scooped him up and carried him up the diamond-sized stairs. She immediately called down a landing bubble to transition them into her ship where she had a portable extraction pool that she intended to use to get her servant cleaned up.

“I fell down!” The human said with clear amusement. “A lot! Through trees!”

“How did you _repeatedly_ fall through trees – “ Blue stopped mid-step as she thought about it some more. “You figured out how to use your flight powers, didn’t you?”

Her human bobbed his shoulders. “Sort of? I could float for a few seconds if I jumped really high.”

Blue sighed through her nose and continued the path to her extraction pool. It was smaller than her pool on Homeworld, in that it was never meant to contain all four diamonds at once, just her. There were similarities – the diamond-shape, the colored capstones at all four points to correspond to the members of the Authority, and the trenches which would convey minuscule fragments of Blue’s power away for gem production. The diamond sat down in the empty pool and let Jet hop off onto the side while it filled with water from a waterfall effect behind the diamond.

“I suppose I’ll have to have a new uniform made for you – unless you’ve learned how to sculpt light into appropriate attire?” Blue looked down at Jet who tried to reach behind himself to touch his gem, but to no avail. “It’s alright, it’s a skill that doesn’t come easily. Pearl, could you….” Blue looked to her side and saw an empty space where her pearl should have been. The diamond buried her face in her hands in exasperation. “Ah, of course. You got me so flustered, I forgot to bring Pearl with us.” Blue extended her will into the ship, and by her command a panel opened up in the side. “Well, I’ll just have to do this myself then.”

From the panel, Blue extracted a stopped bottle of syrupy red fluid. This was opened, and a drop carefully poured into the water as it rose. Pink foam took shape as the water mixed with the liquid soap and air along its surface.

“Alright, jump in,” Blue coaxed the hybrid. “We need to get you clean before someone from my court sees you in this state.”

After a moment of reluctance, Jet moved to the water’s edge, jumped up and landed in the pool with but a small disturbance of the water. He was fortunate it was deep already. When he emerged, he grinned up at her as if he wasn’t the cause for the whole ritual. “If only I needed cleaning, why did you get in too?”

Blue scoffed, and picked the human up out of the water with one hand, then scooped up some foaming water to pour onto him with the other. “The pool doesn’t activate unless I’m in it. Now get to scrubbing, that dirt and those twigs won’t get off you by pure water friction.”

While Jet cleaned himself, Blue Diamond worked in her mind and in her gem. There she stitched together strands of light and willed them into the material plane. In hindsight, she shouldn’t have allowed a servant caste gem like Jet to run around with the appearance of an average human. He was hers, and gems would need to know him as hers with a glance. The trouble with that was to create something which could survive Jet’s activities in the forest. She opted for a shorter loincloth – the original length was down almost to Jet’s ankles, far too long for the wilds – and a top that mostly covered his front, tied together at the neck, and left his back exposed. That would show his gemstone clearly, and have less fabric to catch on. Once he no longer went out into the woods, she would design something more akin to a pearl’s outfit, since she intended jets to decorate her court.

“The forest out there is fantastic,” Jet said as he scrubbed his hair free of dirt and plant matter. “There’s animals hidden in every small crack, you can go so deep there’s barely any light, and the wind makes music as it moves through the trees. You should come with me and see it, my diamond!”

Blue Diamond smiled ruefully. “You forgot to practice your power’s control out there, didn’t you?” She laughed as she watched Jet’s hands freeze mid-scrub. “It’s alright. There’s plenty of time to explore and practice. But I can’t come with you – it’s unbecoming of a diamond to aimlessly explore their colonies. It’s a pleasant thought… but no.”

“But this isn’t a colony,” Jet said with a tilted head. He went back to scrubbing a moment later. “This is the moon of a colony. Is it unbecoming of a diamond to aimlessly explore a moon of a colony?”

“Well…,” Blue examined her knowledge of Homeworld’s laws and found a blank on that subject. “Technically, no. But this moon will be colonized eventually.”

“But it isn’t being colonized right now. So you can explore all you want, and no one can say you’re breaking the rules.”

The diamond inclined her head in thought and smiled faintly. “I… suppose I could. Once I do it, White will definitely make a rule about it, but until she does….”

Jet grinned at her, and Blue felt for a moment like she had when Pink was around, and not being impossible. For the first time in thousands of years, Blue Diamond was happy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If it strikes your fancy, I have a discord server for talking about this and other stories of mine. Check it out if you care to.
> 
> https://discord.gg/dG9Hxr4


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter Seven – Realization**

After the revelation about the ambers’ observational skills, the morale among the peridots was considerably low. Peridot 5XG got hit worse because she had to endure continued interaction with the ambers. Her work speed was slowed by profound lethargy, her results were poor because she couldn’t muster the energy to properly experiment, and her usual witticisms had become garbage tier. At first, the ruby’s words had been soothing – Yellow Diamond had peridots, why would she need ambers? But then one of her fellow Era Two peridots pointed out that ambers _certainly_ were an improvement over _them_. In light of that, perhaps Yellow Diamond would simply discontinue the peridot production, and bring in ambers to do their work.

They’d only be partially replaced, in that peridots would still have their jobs. But as time went on there would be fewer and fewer of them. Until eventually they went the way of the pewter. It was inevitable.

She was stirred from her melancholy by a sudden grapple attack by the female amber, Eye-Five. The squishy gem had wrapped her arms around her and began to squeeze.

“What is the meaning of this?!” Peridot demanded, and glared at the rubies. “You’re supposed to protect us from them too!” It was wholly insufficient to damage Peridot, but the principle of the matter still stood.

As one the rubies rolled their eyes. “You’re fine,” the elder of them said. “It’s just a hug.”

“A what?”

Peridot’s dumbfounded croak moved Eye-Five enough to laugh. “A hug, silly! I’m trying to squish the sadness out of you!”

The technician gem used her touch stubs to stroke her chin thoughtfully. They floated freely, so her arms being bound did little to hamper them. Squishing an emotion out of a gem was an… unconventional way to achieve a result, but it had some merit. Peridot nodded, and barked over her shoulder. “Well, if that’s what you’re trying to do put more effort into it! I’m barely being compressed at all!”

Eye-Five laughed again and easily doubled her hugging pressure.

Peridot grunted from the increased pressure and grit her teeth. “More! We have yet to conclusively prove or disprove your hypothesis.” She evacuated all gaseous matter in her hard-light construct form as the pressure increased again. “More….”

“En-Seven,” Eye-Five called playfully, “could you come help me hug Peridot?”

Peridot was only aware of the telltale ‘thumps’ of En-Seven’s approaching steps after that. “Yes,” she gasped in satisfaction. “His superior strength will easily yield resul-hrlks!” Peridots were made to be tough – they were intended to survive field conditions for drastic repairs, so their poof resistance was at the high end of the spectrum. However the combined strength of two ambers pushed Peridot dangerously close to the poofing threshold, to the point where she couldn’t even see because her eyes bugged out of her head.

When she was released, the first thing she did was hit the ground face-first. “Ow.” The second was to stand and reflect on her emotional state. She was no longer locked into her malaise, and had returned to the neutral state she favored. “Log date Eighteen Nine Two Two, an experiment on the effects of squishing undesired emotion out of a gem have yielded tentatively good results, repeat experiments must be performed.” She looked over at the other peridots in the work area, and put her touch-stubs together to whistle. “Hey, all you unpolished rocks! Line up for experimental emotion purging!”

Behind her En-Seven and Eye-Five began to stretch and get themselves ready for a hugging marathon.

–

Hug-squishing proved a viable method of getting rid of the malaise which had afflicted the peridots, but only as a temporary measure. Frequent hugs were needed to maintain productivity.

Peridot 5XG naturally got the best quality hugs, and they had the longest effect, so she was able to do the most work with the shortest downtime. This allowed her to make two important breakthroughs in the study of the amber’s power. First, she discovered that the harmonics were what allowed the resin produced in the healing to remain a liquid. Next, she found that while an outer shell of the resin hardened during gem-repairs, a layer of it remained liquid as the harmonics were used to vibrate the target and allow the resin to interface with it.

It was reasonably easy to create a similar fluid, one that adapted its resonance to match the target’s. But she needed more data on how the substance healed a gem, so Peridot turned Eye-Five for help. Peridot had noted that Eye-Five’s gem had seemed to lock into an active state some weeks prior, and thought perhaps she could use that to try and heal with Peridot’s synthetic resin.

To her surprise, Eye-Five rubbed some of the resin on her back for the healing experiment before Peridot could fetch a bubbled cracked gem. “Ah,” the amber sighed. “Yes, this works. Create a new batch with tracking robonoids in it so we can see how the effects work.”

Peridot narrowed her eyes at the human. “Why did you do that?”

Eye-Five smiled. “Because my back hurts.”

“Why does your back hurt?”

Eye-Five smiled wider. “Because I’m carrying additional weight.”

Peridot’s eyes narrowed even more. “Why are you carrying additional weight?”

“Because I’m making a new amber inside me.” She rubbed her stomach and for the first time Peridot saw that Eye-Five’s abdominal region was swollen.

“You’re… making a new amber. In there?” Peridot pointed at the hybrid’s abdominal region. “How? With what resources?”

“When we eat, we put aside some resources to allow us to have extra to pull on in case of environmental changes. This is one of them.” Eye-Five’s eyes sparkled as she explained it all.

Peridot was, however, extremely confused and alarmed. “But… but you need an injector to make a gem!”

En-Seven whistled at her from his spot in the amber’s tree.

“And the new gem has to come out of a hole!”

Eye-Five nodded.

Peridot’s narrowed eyes were replaced with dawning horror as she fully realized the scope of what she’d just heard. “Your entire cabochon are equipped with miniature kindergartens? That pull from resources you can stockpile?”

Again, Eye-Five nodded and grinned. “Not just us. All fossils can do this!”

It was like the floor had fallen out from under Peridot’s feet and she was falling. “All of them?”

All of them. Agates, and opals would never need to be produced from a kindergarten again. Two niche roles, no major loss. But Peridot had read the notes on proto-form gem categories which would radically alter the balance of power in gem society.

–

Blue Diamond had never before walked under the boughs of a tree. It was a surreal experience, to see structures which look as firm and secure as stone sway under the force of a mild breeze. Jet swung from branch to branch by way of thick vines, and bounced along bubbles if he could not swing to catch the next vine easily.

It was graceful to watch. His lessons with Pearl had really paid off.

Exoskeletal animals seemed to be the type of organic animal which the moon sported the most of. Armored crabs with homes made from boulders, land lobsters with the claws to crush those boulders, and wasps large enough to carry away the lobsters were just a few that Blue Diamond saw on their outing. It gave her such ideas for new murals, statues, and mosaics to remember them by when the moon was colonized.

Blue didn’t like it when they scuttled onto _her_, but she didn’t mind watching them when they were elsewhere. She liked to watch them move, she just didn’t want to have them _touching_ her when they did. The wasps, she found out, didn’t take to gentle persuasion when she tried to get them to leave her alone – and she had to lay waste to their hive before they got the message.

“Alright, Jet,” she said when they came to a cave system. “This looks like a good spot for you to practice your power. Head on in.”

Jet hesitated, perhaps because it was dark and unfamiliar, but Blue placed her hand behind him and gently scooted him into the caves. 

“Your gem can give you the light you need – you just need to command it so. I will be out here, you won’t have to worry.”

How odd, Blue thought as Jet scurried off into the cave. The whole situation was odd, being out in the _wilds_ of a strange moon, with one of her gems which couldn’t control their powers. Really, she pondered as she sat down near the cave, if Jet hadn’t come from Pink’s zoo, and Pink’s methods, she would have had him destroyed for the trouble he’d caused.

And she’d still be miserable, if she’d done that.

The diamond of art and beauty slumped against the trunk of a giant tree, and even with its mass it groaned to bear Blue Diamond’s weight. If she’d just done what she’d done for any other gem, she’d be miserable and stuck crying constantly again. She hadn’t cried in days, she realized with a start.

The pain of losing Pink was still so sharp it felt like it would cut her up inside, and she didn’t miss her any less. But Blue didn’t feel the urge to sob over Pink anymore. She didn’t feel _better_, but she didn’t feel _broken_. Blue was sure Yellow would tell her it was being back at work which had helped her, but Blue speculated the reason to be something different. She glanced at the cave, and heard faint notes of distorted singing. Her aura flared so that she wouldn’t be touched by Jet’s power unintentionally.

Would Pink approve of being… replaced by an organic? Tears bubbled up in Blue’s eyes as she genuinely couldn’t answer that question for herself. Pink had _adored_ organics. So much that Blue wondered if Pink would have been happier _as_ an organic.

Blue rested her head against the tree trunk and imagined what it would be like. Pink as an organic. Ridiculous! She closed her eyes to envision it better, and as she did her aura weakened just a bit. Just enough. Blue perceived the dappled light that came down through the trees as a line against the back of her eyelids. As she imagined, that line coiled and twisted down like the lines on a drill bit toward the bottom of an abyss behind her eyes.

_ “A dream is a wish your heart makes / When you’re fast asleep.”_

Blue imagined herself as a human woman. She walked through a castle made of mere rocks carefully carved into pleasing patterns by flimsy human hands. Pink walked beside her in the shape of a younger woman than Blue imagined herself. Still young enough that it was acceptable for Blue to lead her by the hand.

_ “In dreams you will lose your heartaches / Whatever you dream of, you keep.”_

They came to a courtyard full of plants and little animals in cages, a garden – just for Pink! On all walls of the garden were statues of White, in the pose she’d held for hundreds of years. Blue let the girl go play while she imagined Yellow in the shape of a human soldier advanced to talk to her about affairs of state. Things like _growing food_ and the necessity of _clean water_. Such trivialities! But Blue’s mind was always on Pink, on how happy she was to play, and be free of the burdens she would one day have to bear.

_ “No matter how your heart is grieving / If you keep on believing / The dream that you wish will come true.”_

After she and Yellow had talked for a while, Blue imagined her seated next to a fountain in the garden. While she sat and watched Pink play with a small simian animal, she imagined Jet to be there. Even as a human, Blue was still taller than him, but he didn’t care. Jet came to sit next to Blue and watched Pink alongside her. Blue’s arm wrapped around Jet’s waist to draw him closer to her, and –

Blue Diamond snapped out of her imaginings right then and there. She flared her aura to full strength and forced out the thin traces of Jet’s power that had managed to get through. Her face was flushed as she berated herself mentally for even _thinking_ such things. It was inappropriate! Unnatural!

And exactly what Pink would do, in her position.

“A diamond must stand apart,” she told herself as she forced down the _improper_ thoughts. “No need for friendships, no need for support from anyone or anything.” But that hadn’t been the case for anyone except White Diamond. Yellow and Blue had always supported each other, and Pink had always asked them for support. White was the one who always acted like she _tolerated_ her fellow diamonds.

Why wasn’t it true for her? Why couldn’t Blue be like White and _not care_? Why did she need Pink to make her happy, and then an _organic_ to do the same when Pink was gone? Why did her imaginings lead her to thinking _that way_ for her _servant_?

Pink had been _that way_ for her servant. Her first pearl, the one White had cruelly taken away and abused to teach Pink a lesson.

Horror dawned in Blue’s mind as she put the pieces together. “Was it… me?” She asked herself as she covered her face with her hands. “Did Pink have all those terrible habits and… and favor those organics because she learned it from _what I did_?” Blue was the only one to let Pink keep any organic pets. Blue had been the one to build the zoo, and then keep the zoo, on Pink’s behalf. And Blue had been the one to try and teach Pink how to be a diamond the most. “Was… I the problem?”

“What’s the problem, my diamond?”

Blue whirled around, and saw Jet. He had come from the cave, and looked up at her with clear worry.

“Is something the matter? Did I do it wrong again?”

Blue shook her head to get herself out of the past and laid down her hand for Jet to climb onto. “No, no. I’m just shocked at how late we are,” Blue lied seamlessly. “We’ve been out far too long, for a first trip anyway. Come on, let’s go back to the base.”

“Okay, my diamond.” Jet’s tone and face made it seem like he didn’t _completely_ believe her lie, but he wouldn’t resist. “As you command.”

–

Jasper dreamed in the periods where she was permitted free time. She would go to her cubby hole, slump against the wall, and sleep like she was an organic. It made her mind sharper when she woke up, it made her aware of things she missed when she was awake. And it gave her something to do besides think about herself.

She dreamed she was on a jungle planet, with a platoon of other quartz soldiers. For some reason they were in frantic retreat, and Jasper was near the back of the pack, meaning she’d been one of the last to fall back. It didn’t make sense, Jasper’s sleeping mind thought, there had been no retreat orders given during the rebellion that took place in the jungle. When was this?

The jungle gave way to a field of tall grass, almost as tall as the quartz soldiers but nowhere near Jasper’s height. “Don’t go into the long grass,” Jasper frantically shouted but she didn’t know why. She tried to grab a nearby carnelian but the red quartz slipped through her fingers like smoke. “Don’t go into the long grass!”

With her height, she saw something move through the long grass in pursuit of the fleeing gems. Jasper called on her crash helmet and chased after her fellow soldiers. Soon enough the pursuers revealed themselves. A human with black pits and red dots for eyes lept from the grass onto the back of a fleeing amethyst. Jasper could hear shock become terror and then pain in the quartz’s screams. When she got to the scene the amethyst was gone, and only shards in the human’s teeth remained of her. The human hissed at Jasper and darted away into the long grass.

The same sick drama unfolded again and again with each soldier that Jasper tried to rescue. The worst ones were the times she would arrive just as the human’s teeth broke apart the gem. Jasper would watch with horror as the gem’s form dispersed, and the pain that would be the last thing the poor quartz ever felt was etched into Jasper’s memory.

And eventually, Jasper was the only one left. All the other quartz soldiers in her platoon were gone. The grass rustled around her, and Jasper rolled to spin dash at the enemy. But there was nothing for her to connect with. The humans darted around, and were too fast for her power to catch them.

“Cowards!” Jasper howled into the night. “Monsters! I won’t let you gobble me up! You hear me?! If you want me, you’ll pay for me with your worthless lives!” The humans made no response but to rustle more of the grass around her. “I won’t lay down and let you shatter me!”

A new rustle happened in the long grass. Someone walking. Jasper turned and saw Pink Diamond, with her eyes as black pits with red dots at their core.

“Wha – “

“Jasper,” Pink Diamond said with _Rose Quartz’s_ voice. “Lay down.”

Pink was _her_ diamond, she had to obey. Jasper’s body moved against her will, even as she tried to fight it. “N-no….”

“Jasper,” Pink Diamond said with Holly-Blue Agate’s voice. “Become food for my precious humans.”

“N-no….” Jasper was only able to look at the sky as human faces surrounded her on all sides. “Not like this….”

_Crack._

Jasper woke in a cold sweat, and startled her amethyst neighbor with her panicked gasps. She held her head in her hand as she realized it was all a dream. It was only a dream.

It was a dream that could become real at _any moment_.

“They all need to be destroyed,” Jasper muttered to herself as she tried to calm down. “They all need to be destroyed.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter Eight – What do you Fight for?**

The research project was almost complete. Another peridot had managed to find a material that could agitate chronotons in a similar manner to what ambers could do naturally. It was an exotic material that wouldn’t exist naturally, and would require minute amounts of amber resin for best results. But the sticky green fluid was capable of healing damage to gems and repairing damaged gem technology without any input from a gem. They even managed to program in dematerialization once it had served its function, like how amber resin would allow gems to explode out of it.

Next on the list was to put together an application method. A robonoid was the most likely vector, and Peridot 5XG had put forth the term ‘flask robonoid’ for its taxonomy. The time-dialation effect of the liquid also prevented it from running dry unless it was cracked open – the repair-liquid would rewind time to when the flask was full infinitely unless damaged severely.

Yellow Diamond was sure to be pleased with their results. They would get positive reviews on their job reports, and they would be given a better chance at a pleasant assignment. And Peridot would likely never see either amber again.

Why did that displease her, she wondered. Why was that not an optimal condition? Wouldn’t seeing more ambers mean she had a higher chance of being replaced by one?

After the report was sent to Yellow Diamond, they had nothing to do but effect repairs to cracked gems with the robonoids and ambers. The other peridots seemed excited to be done with the unpleasant assignment, and Peridot still couldn’t figure out why she wasn’t.

Suddenly, she was hugged by Eye-Five and En-Seven at the same time. Not a full-on emotion squishing hug as Eye-Five was too enlarged to manage the strength needed. “What’s this then?”

Eye-Five rubbed her cheek into Peridot’s yellow-green hair like it was a bristle brush. “We want to say goodbye. You’re our favorite peridot.”

“Oh. Good to see that you have excellent taste,” Peridot muttered.

En-Seven licked her and resisted Peridot’s sudden confused thrashing. “Hmm. Tastes like when the fruit is light green.” He made a displeased face. “Sour. But we like you anyway.”

“If inter-court violence was permitted on this class of ship I would give you _such a swat_ – !”

“That is enough squabbling,” Yellow Sapphire said as she appeared at the workstation door. Immediately, the ambers released Peridot and saluted the sapphire like all other gems in attendance. “The report has been read, and questions have arisen.” The tiny gem looked over at Peridot and waved her up. “You have the answers that are sought. Come.”

Peridot hastily cleaned off the last remnants of En-Seven’s saliva on her face, and hastily brushed off any human hair that had gotten onto her uniform while she followed the smaller gem and her ruby guards at a respectful distance. The report went to the diamonds, so it was most likely Peridot would meet her diamond – Yellow Diamond. The doubt and unease that had filled her before was replaced with confidence and certitude. She was the one who made the critical breakthroughs in the flask robonoid project, the base liquid. And she’d seen the most of what the ambers could do. She was an _authority_ on the ambers’ capabilities, and Yellow Diamond had seen her important work.

Yellow Sapphire stopped by a door which one of her rubies opened. “Go in. Answer the diamond’s questions without lying. And if you’re lucky, you will emerge unscathed.”

Peridot could almost swear she heard a note of fear in the sapphire’s voice, but that was impossible. Yellow Diamond was a perfectly rational leader, and the most level headed diamond of the entire Authority.

Yellow Sapphire grabbed her limb-enhancer as Peridot passed and looked up at the technician gem. Her hands shook, and there was visible sweat on her face around her visor. “I said _without lying_. That’s the important part. Without. Lying.” The aristocrat let Peridot go and backed away.

She stepped through to the grand central crossroads at the palm of the Hand of Authority, where all the principle halls in the digits connected. Inside there was no larger than life figure, nor a communicator which portrayed her image. Instead what she found inside was a pearl, monochromatic in colors with her gem in her navel, and one eye heavily scarred. Peridot couldn’t imagine what had caused the damage, nor why the pearl seemed so serene about it, and the pose the Pearl held – her arms outstretched with her palms upward – weirded her out.

“Peridot 2F5L 5XG,” the pearl said airily and focused her one eye on the green gem. “White Diamond would like to see you.”

–

Holly-Blue made sure that in the days that followed, in the years that followed them, that things were kept under control at the zoo. Her soldiers had told her about the Jasper’s mutterings, and colluded with Holly-Blue to keep her precious hybrids safe. Holly-Blue found her disgust for the Earth-made quartzes erode as they went above and beyond to help her protect the organic gems from Jasper’s _underhanded_ attempts.

When Jasper would get too close to doing irreversible harm, an amethyst or another jasper would cause a scene or get in the way. Holly-Blue even had to make a show about punishing them for their ‘sloppy’ bearing to sell the deceptions. Jasper was no fool, she knew what they were up to, but Sagenite Agate was blind to their manipulations.

The yellow agate even expressed sympathy to Holly-Blue behind closed doors, for having to deal with such _inadequate_ troops. Of course Holly-Blue would paint herself as suffering so that Blue Diamond would be more at ease with Pink’s passing. For a gem, time passed quickly – thousands of years could be like the span of minutes. Holly-Blue had her work with the humans to slow down her perception of time to their scale, so she got to see gradual changes more clearly than perhaps Sagenite Agate or Jasper did.

The fossils had begun to wisen up to Jasper’s attempts. They had begun to see that the interference of the other quartz soldiers was too regular, too predictable. For all that Jasper thought them animals, the hybrids weren’t stupid.

Eventually, one decided to fight back with vigor.

It was her display model fossil, the agatized bone. To make it clearer what they referred to, Blue Diamond had made a decree that the agates were to be referred to as ‘gembone’, and the category would remain ‘fossil’. That agate was the first to manifest his gem weapon, and it happened a few years after Jasper started her endeavor. Jasper had been sparring with the gembone, and gotten too rowdy, she had summoned her crash helmet and enveloped herself in an aura of orange fire as she rushed the agate.

Three different amethysts and an off-color jasper rushed in to try and interfere with the attack, but it was all unneeded. The gembone stood his ground, planted his feet, and met Jasper’s attack with his own. The display model gembone’s gem was in his head, and it called forth a weapon of eerie white. A helmet that enveloped his entire head, with a beaked mouth, empty sockets which allowed him to see, a massive frill which extended out the back to cover his neck, and three horns which protruded forward. Two from above each eye, and one from the ‘nose’ of the beak.

Jasper’s attack was stalled when her helmet met his. She pushed him back maybe a meter before their strength evened out. Jasper’s helmet fit between the horns of the gembone’s helmet, but there was one mistake to Jasper’s positioning. The gembone’s nose horn was perilously close to her visor – and thus her face. He worked his neck, and jabbed the nose horn into her visor enough to crack it, which startled Jasper. This allowed him to push her back. Jasper’s feet dug trenches in the heavy stone of the training room floor as she went.

“That. Is. Enough!” Holly-Blue and Sagenite Agate both shouted in near-perfect synch. Holly-Blue had the benefit of her gem weapon being an electrified whip, while Sagenite Agate produced a technological one from her belt. Two cracks of the whip was enough to signal to the quartz gems that serious business was at hand. The proper gems fell in line and saluted, while the hybrids did so after they processed what their fellows had done.

The two agates started in on their disobedient subordinates in a worry-induced angry rant (Holly-Blue), and a dressing down for complete lack of decorum (Sagenite).

“I _cannot_ believe what I just saw! I raised you better than that, young man! You’re the display model gembone, the one to which all others in your cabochon look to for leadership; a role model for all fossils! How could you know what your gem weapon would be? You would could have met her charge with a spear which she would have driven _right through your head_! I’m so extremely disappointed in you!”

“Soldier this was a _sparring match_. A _learning experience_. Do I need to teach you basic vocabulary, is that it? Are you just _missing a word_ in your _rock-tumbled lexicon_? On Earth was it customary to draw weapons and apply mystical arts in _fist-to-fist_ combat? A gem of your decorated career might have certain ideas about what you can get away with, well I don’t care if you personally shattered Rose Quartz’s entire cut of gem – you will obey the limits of your assignment while under _my_ command. Am I understood?”

Needless to say, neither gem or hybrid got off easy for their fight. The gembone was in tears because he’d never seen Holly-Blue so angry and didn’t know how else to respond. Jasper was in tears because Sagenite was more liberal with the whip as she talked than Holly-Blue; and even as tough as Jasper was, a taste of the whip hurt.

“Soldier, you are sentenced to polishing duty for three weeks. Perhaps servicing your fellow quartzes will teach you control.”

“Bee-Four, you’re going to be a trainee midwife for the two ammonites we’re expecting in the next three weeks. I hope it teaches you to respect your life!”

The two chastised gems were sent away and the training session was set to continue without them, albeit tense. Holly-Blue was so incensed, she didn’t even notice that the chastisement didn’t seem to affect the widespread group until much later. And it wasn’t hard to see why – because both groups found a reason to identify with the chastised party.

–

Bee-Four carried a bundle of damp towels to the lake, grumpy and sad. The amethyst midwives had put him to work cleaning bathing towels for the pregnant women and to return with the towels damp and cool. Which meant he would be stinky on the way to the lake, and then cold and wet on the way back.

As soon as he got to the water’s edge and sat down to dunk the first towel in the lake, Bee-Four found himself surrounded. Other gembones and ammonites surrounded him all with smiles and bright eyes.

“Here to make fun of me for making Holly-Blue mad?” He asked, still in his grumpy mood.

“You summoned your weapon,” responded Ehm-One, another gembone. She looked at him like he was some fascinating new feature of the zoo. “Can we see it?”

Bee-Four made a sour face and dunked the first towel in the lake to start cleaning. “I don’t know how it happened, it just did. I don’t know how to do it again.”

“Well, how did you _feel_?” Asked the display model ammonite, Jay-Eight. He smiled encouragingly and grabbed a towel from the pile to wash it alongside Bee-Four. “When the Little Voice taught us ammonites to use our voice, she said it was all in your emotions.”

Bee-Four squinted at the other fossil, but soon all the fossils around him had grabbed some towels and begun to wash them. Suddenly he didn’t have work to distract him from their question – their villainous plan, revealed. He sighed and looked down at the towel while he cleaned it. “I felt… tired. Not like, I wanted to sleep. But like I didn’t want this to keep happening. Jasper is always pushing us, trying to get a reason to hit us, and I was sick of it. I didn’t want to keep being rescued.” He squeezed the towel tight as those feelings came rushing back. “I wanted to be able to fight back – to be the one who rescues someone….” There was a flash of light, and suddenly Bee-Four’s vision was slightly restricted.

“Whoa!” The other fossils all stared in wonder, while Ehm-One gave voice to their emotions. “It’s so… white! And it has horns!”

He’d summoned his helmet again?

Jay-Eight poked at the nose horn and sharply drew his finger back. “Ow! It’s sharp!” The ammonite looked at the horns on Bee-Four’s helmet warily while he sucked on his finger.

Other gembones in the area closed their eyes in reflection, but nothing happened. A plethora of minor questions about how it felt to have the helmet on, how he could still hear with his ears blocked, and specifics on how he called the weapon. Perhaps each weapon was different?

Bee-Four was grateful for the distraction and the help with the towels, however he was ever so slightly annoyed when his fellow fossils started to hang the towels over his helmet’s horns.

–

Jasper reported to the polishing chair in the barracks immediately after she was released from the training activity. A polygonal station nearby dispensed the polishing cloth and would do the same for the gel once a gem was in the chair. Polishing improved a gem’s ability to take in light, the closest equivalent a gem had to ‘eating’. There was also some ancillary effects like improving appearances, but those were for aristocrat gems. Soldiers only needed the practical benefit.

She expected the Earth-made quartzes to come in with smirks and malicious looks, its what she had done when a soldier got polishing duty as a punishment. But to her unmitigated fury, when the amethysts, jaspers, and carnelians all arrived they barely acknowledged the polishing station, or Jasper. The amethysts were roughhousing, Jasper overheard another jasper talk about the repairs the peridots weren’t doing which they ought to, and a short carnelian cartwheeled around the barracks without a care in the world.

Jasper grit her teeth and clenched her hands. They just went about their day, their free time, like her chastisement hadn’t happened. Like it was just a routine occurrence.

“Hey, biggie.”

Jasper snapped out of her glowering to see the short carnelian from earlier in the polishing chair. The perfect quartz sighed and scooped up the polishing gel from the platform. A dab on the carnelian’s gem, and Jasper went to polishing. Circular motions around the edge of the gem then move inward.

“Guess all us Earth gems are screwups, huh?”

The perfect quartz didn’t pause in her polishing as she growled her reply. “Hmm.”

“You’re right, I _am_ right,” the red quartz nodded to herself. The other quartzes were listening, as some amethysts snickered at the facetious comment. “I mean, we get Holly-Blue mad at us on the daily, you’re just now getting your agate mad at you. Pretty soon you’ll be the same as us.”

Jasper paused polishing for just a moment to glare at the carnelian. She was shorter than a quartz was required to be, indicating she had come out misshapen. An off-color. “I’m nothing like you.”

Carnelian shrugged. “Agree to disagree.”

“You’re only here because Blue Diamond pities you.”

“And you think it’s not the same for you and Yellow?”

Jasper acted before she thought, and it was only when she had a half-dozen purple weapons pointed at her that she realized she’d pulled her fist back to lay into Carnelian. Who, for her position of ‘about to be left hooked’ by the perfect quartz, looked bored.

Carnelian arched an eyebrow. “Blue keeps us around cause the way we act reminds her of Pink. Yellow keeps you around because she finds you useful. Both of them tolerate us, for different reasons.”

The weapons retracted, and Jasper lowered her fist.

“But we don’t have to do that to each other. We don’t have to _tolerate_ each other. We’re all Earth-made rocks. We’re all screwups in our own way. And we don’t really fit in the order of the diamonds because Pink’s gone.”

Jasper was confused by the off-color’s utter lack of care for her own safety. She’d just tried to attack her, and the short carnelian just kept on talking. That confusion gave Carnelian’s words an avenue for entry into Jasper’s mind, specifically into the thousands of feelings she’d had to bury to do her job.

“Newsflash, biggie. The way _you_ think and act about those fossils? It’s the way everyone else acts about _us_.”

Doubt bubbled up to the surface, and certain scenes played out differently in Jasper’s head.

_Sagenite Agate looked over an entire cut of Pink’s gems alongside Yellow Diamond. Jasper was among the gems who stood before them for examination. “They should all be destroyed.”_

_“I agree,” Yellow quipped, “but White says they’re mine now. She said ‘put them to work’ and there’s limits on how I can interpret that.”_

Carnelian snapped her fingers in Jasper’s face to bring her back to reality. “There’s room in the fam’ for you too, if you want it. You don’t gotta do it alone if you don’t want to.” When she was satisfied Jasper was paying attention, she sat back in her seat. Her body became red-tinged light as she flipped her gemstone around so the other side could be polished too. “Don’t gotta fight everyone all the time.”

Jasper automatically began to polish the red hexagonal gemstone as emotions continued to bubble up from long suppression. “Fighting is what I was made for.”

“Fighting for _Pink_ is what _we_ were made for. Where’s Pink again?” Carnelian looked sidelong at Jasper. “Just think about it. You’re going to be here a few years, teaching them newbies how to be gems. Plenty of time.”

Carnelian left, and no other quartz filled the seat. They left Jasper to think about what she’d said, and about the feelings she could no longer suppress.

\---

Agatized bones have been given a proper name! Gembone!


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter Nine – Begone**

The next time they wandered the forests of the moon, Blue remembered to bring Pearl with them. In the time between the first adventure and the next, the colony was given a name – Klavius Seven. So far things were going great. The organic life mostly avoided the colonization sites, except for predatory megafauna, but for all their size they lacked the capacity to fight gem technology. While Blue Diamond followed Jet to a spot he had found on his first adventure, Pearl sat in Blue’s loop of hair, drawing.

Blue wouldn’t admit it, but she intended to use her pearl’s drawings of the local wildlife and scenes to inspire the art she would decorate the colony with once the organics were driven to extinction.

Jet swung through the trees, and Blue walked far below. It had gotten to the point where she could just listen to the air he displaced, and know which way he went. Frequently he moved so fast he had to double back when Blue had to move around an obstacle. There were some boulders even a diamond struggled to move.

“What’s so special about this spot anyway?” Blue Diamond called up to the hybrid that swung from tree to tree.

“It’s on the edge of the plateau!” Jet grinned down at her. “You can see the clouds fall off the sides like a waterfall!”

That gave Blue pause. She had been intending to work the query into a direction of ‘let’s just stop here for the day’ but that sounded legitimately interesting. Living billions of years would lead anyone to seeing multiple fantastic things – and Blue had. She immortalized them in artwork, or preserved them in her colonies where she could. Perhaps that was where Pink had gotten the idea to preserve humans, and for her fossils. It was the logical next step from Blue’s behavior.

Blue shook her head as tears began to form and smiled up at Jet. “Alright, I’m right behind you!” When Jet swung off, Blue held her head in her hands and walked blindly in the direction Jet had gone. “What is _wrong_ with me? Jet wants to show me something beautiful and all I can do is break down over Pink again.” Suddenly, she looked up in shook. Just in time too, as she almost walked into a tree. “I’ve been doing that to Yellow all this time.” She ran her hand through her hair and looked down miserably. “I’ll have to make it up to her once I get back. Pearl? Remind me to set up an audience with Yellow once we’re done here.”

“Of course, my diamond,” Pearl replied, demure.

She continued to walk, until the lighting through the trees changed to indicate there were no further obstructions. Blue stepped out onto the edge of the plateau, and beheld the basin stretch out before her. Mountains split the middle, mostly covered by trees. To Blue’s artistic eyes, the mountains looked like the silhouette of a woman laid down upon the moon’s surface to sleep. Perhaps it was, the tree-covered remains of some giant organic woman who had lived eons ago. Blue saw Jet seated on the edge of the plateau with his feet off the side, kicking in the air, and sat down slightly behind him.

Pearl lept from her diamond’s hair to sit beside Jet, since Blue Diamond could not. Even with a body of light, Blue weighed hundreds of tonnes.

Jet grinned at his fellow servant, then turned to do the same to Blue. He glanced back at the basin briefly, then looked at Blue and pointed eastward. “It’s starting! See?”

Blue looked east, and there she saw dark grey thunderheads roll across through the forest due to how tremendously high the plateau was. She watched in awe as the rain from those storm clouds raced the clouds themselves to the bottom of the basin, to fill it up. “How odd,” she commented. “Typically rain clouds don’t fall to the surface….” While her intellect marveled at the cause behind the falling clouds, her artistic nature appreciated the beauty. It did look like the clouds spilled out into the basin like a waterfall. Blue smiled as she watched the basin begin to fill with the tall thunderheads. The mountainous woman looked like she was laying in a bath tub of clouds! “It’s beautiful.”

She glanced down, saw Pearl draw the scene on her holo-tablet, and then saw Jet. He looked up at her with the most radiant smile Blue had ever seen, like he had stars in his eyes.

“Jet, you’re missing it by looking at me.”

“Remember when I said your smile was the prettiest thing I’d seen?” He asked, quiet. “Well, now I’ve seen something beautiful, and your smile still beats it. No contest.”

The two sides to Blue Diamond were stunned by such a thing. Her gems would often comment upon her luster, her radiance, or her radiance, all vapid compliments from people who were obligated to compliment her. Yet here, she had a small thing that had shown her beauty, and helped her find happiness. A _human being_ could understand beauty and see it in Blue Diamond, even when she’d been a shell of herself.

Gem instincts were like hardwired instructions. Things like ‘You, Perfect Being, are created to be a matriarch of the gem race’ and such things. But Blue’s gem fed her a new set of instructions: Reach down, stretch out her hand to let Jet embrace it, and embrace joy for the first time in millennia. He did hug her, like he wanted to squish the sadness out of her. For a moment, it felt like he did.

But then something else happened. Blue’s body became light, Jet’s body became light. His blackened gem raced up the length of their collective light to find a place on her back. Foreign thoughts combined with hers. Hair of rolling thunderclouds, tall enough to touch the heavens, two grey-blue eyes easily expressive of sorrow, a third eye of coal black. A gown of simple fabric that hung on them like drapery, but their bearing was such that it appeared a regal gown. A gemstone in the front of their chest, and one on its exact opposite on their back.

For the first time, perhaps the last time, the universe strained under the tremendous stormy weight of Grey Diamond.

Pearl finished her drawing, turned around, and promptly started a new one of the person she saw behind her.

Their hands moved, and displaced the air in their wake. Grey hands, the color of stone and sombre skies, with fingernails much like a human’s. They beheld themselves in wonder, for all of a few moments before fear creeped in.

“Oh no,” they said in a voice that was entirely new. “We can’t have done this! We can’t have!” One hand stroked the other, and while the droopy eyes closed the coal black one remained open. “Shh. Calm. Gentle. Safe. What’s wrong, my diamond.” Their droopy eyes opened again, welled with tears. “We can’t have done this. Because if we have, I have to shatter you. I don’t have a choice.” The coal black eye was confused, and they hugged themselves as if they wished to squeeze the fear out. “I don’t understand, you were so happy a moment ago. Why is being so happy so bad?” They shook their head, and the droopy eyes couldn’t hold back the tears. “Because this is forbidden! Two different gems, combining together like this – I’ve shattered gems for this! I’ll have to do it in the future! It isn’t fair to them if I let this go, I don’t have any _choice_!” Suddenly, the droopy eyes sharpened, as keen intellect behind them worked quickly. “Unless… yes that might work.” The coal black eye glittered with fear. “What are you planning to do?” The droopy eyes looked up at the coal black eye critically. “Jet, let me go.”

Their body became radiant light again, and the two split apart. Jet was let go into the open air, but produced a bubble under himself to float upon. “My diamond,” he started, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know that could happen – “

Blue promptly bubbled him herself, with narrowed eyes. “It doesn’t matter. It is forbidden to happen, and it happened. It cannot happen again.” She focused her gaze on her Pearl, who had dismissed her tablet to bow. “This never happened. Am I clear?”

“Yes, my diamond,” Pearl replied, demure.

“Good. We’re going back.” Blue regarded the bubbled human warily. “And you’re staying in there until I can have a talk with your maker.”

–

Peridot 5XG hadn’t known it was possible to travel by bubble before. But she supposed, White Diamond had more knowledge of gem powers than she, after all Era Two peridots didn’t have any powers. Peridot didn’t realize where they were going until she vaguely saw the pointy-haired silhouette of the Head of Authority through the bubble. White Diamond’s ship, in the image of a head and torso. Peridot didn’t dare break from the salute she’d made when the pearl had absconded with her.

Within moments, she was in an entirely white room, and the bubble around her dissolved. Then, like she was a projection, the pearl withdrew through the wall she had arrived in. There didn’t appear to be any doors in or out of the room. Then Peridot saw why.

White Diamond was on a raised base that, for her, would be the difference between the tops of her toes and the bottoms. But for Peridot it was a series of stairs. White diamond was dressed in white in black, with glittering fabric that caught and reflected light as easily as a topaz caught fugitives. Her arms were outstretched with the palms down, in a gesture Peridot didn’t know the significance of. The paramount diamond’s face was obscured by her radiant white light, only her black lipstick, and eyelashes helped Peridot see where her face was.

“Well hello there,” the diamond greeted her jovially. “Aren’t we dedicated? Waiting to speak until spoken to, how professional.”

“Peridot Facet 2F5L, Cut 5XG, reporting as ordered, your radiance,” Peridot quickly responded, beads of sweat rolled down her face behind her visor.

“Yes, I know. I read your report. Quite clever of you, to figure out that the amber’s abilities all revolve around time dilation. I couldn’t help but also notice some… preposterous notes about the ambers having cognitive abilities on par with your own.” White Diamond smiled radiantly. “I’m hoping you can clear up this error in your report.”

“Yes, your radiance,” Peridot quickly bowed. “I should not have listed it a cognitive abilities. It would be more accurate to describe it as cognitive growth.”

“Oh? I’m an old gem, could you please describe the difference?” The diamond’s voice was coy, alarmingly so.

Peridot’s sweating got considerably worse. “The ambers initially presented with deficient intelligence and awareness. However when exposed to people of greater intelligence, they adapted to their surroundings. This is typical of all Blue Diamond’s gems, but the ambers have the capacity to fill a gap in a setting by being granted a period of observation that exceeds previously observed adaptability.”

“...I see.” White Diamond closed her eyes for a moment then snapped them right back open with manic delight. “Tell me, then. Would you say that ambers are a better use of resource than another class of gem? Hmm, I don’t know, let’s go with peridots.” Her eyes and smile became stable as she reached that conclusion. “Yes. Are ambers a better use of precious resources than peridots?”

Well that was a terrifying question to hear from the absolute monarch of gemkind. Peridot swallowed hard, and remembered Yellow Sapphire’s warning. She couldn’t lie if she wanted to get out of this. “Po...tentially?”

“What.”

Peridot didn’t fully process what White Diamond said, she hadn’t expected such a flat question devoid of the monarch’s coy tone. But it was still a question, so Peridot quickly recovered to answer it. “Peridots have a lot more environments where they can remain active, while ambers have hard upper and lower temperature limits. Peridots need to be made in kindergartens, but they don’t need a period of observation to do their jobs – they can get started right away. Ambers can heal, and have time dilation powers, but they also have necessary upkeep and productivity issues. I don’t know the exact resources for an amber’s production, but peridotite is pretty common in most colony planets. So, with all that in mind, I have to respond with the results being inconclusive, but lean towards yes.”

White Diamond slowly blinked. It took about thirty seconds to complete, if Peridot was correct. “I think your period of frequent interaction with them has clouded your judgment. You’re so enamored with the _idea_ of ambers that you can’t see their flaws. Your diamond sees clearly, learn from her example.”

“But – “

White Diamond continued like Peridot hadn’t said anything. “I’d like you to see if your flask robonoids or the amber’s resin can repair shattered gems. If it can be done, then being shattered will be far less permanent of a punishment, and we can replace being bubbled with being shattered for a thousand years or two. You’ll naturally serve as an attache to my court during this study, and there will be no direct interaction with the team which monitors the ambers. Your manager will provide you more details. That will be all.” White Diamond’s ponderous hands moved together to clap twice, the dismissal gesture. The strike of one of her hands on the other was like a roll of thunder.

Peridot was enveloped by a white bubble again, and quickly returned to the Hand of Authority she had left.

–

Jet sat glumly in the royal blue bubble while Blue Diamond barked orders for the galaxy warp to be completed sooner than scheduled. Outside, Pearl stood with her hands clasped in a watchful position over the bubble. All around them, blue gems worked with visible strain to heed their diamond’s orders and to complete their tasks artistically.

He looked at Pearl and decided to try talking to her. “I didn’t even know that I could do that – “

“My diamond has commanded me that the event you reference never happened,” Pearl calmly, quietly, but firmly cut him off. “But if such a thing did happen, it would not matter. There is no room in the law for ignorance.”

“But… if such a thing happened, it would have made Blue Diamond so happy.” Jet caught onto the little game of pretend quickly. “Why would Blue Diamond make a law that makes her miserable?”

“She does not make the law. She enforces the law. Another diamond is responsible for making the law.”

“… One diamond can command another?”

“If they’re stronger, bigger, and meaner, yes.” Pearl turned slightly to Jet. With her hair over her eyes it was impossible to read her expression. “Once, there were four diamonds. Pink was the smallest, the weakest, and the nicest. Thus she was commanded by the others. Only our diamond and Yellow Diamond see each other as equals.”

Jet tried to imagine the bigger, stronger, and meaner diamond which commanded Blue Diamond. His image was of a Blue Diamond shaped person about thirty percent larger with crab claws for hands, and lobsters for teeth. Truly horrifying.

The bubble which held Jet was seized and lifted up by Blue Diamond suddenly, and Jet’s imaginings were cut off. “The Homeworld warp is ready,” Blue said in a low tone. “I’ve instructed Holly-Blue Agate to meet us in my palace.”

“Um, okay –“

“Hush now. Pearl, come.” Blue Diamond carried the bubbled hybrid to a crystalline platform barely large enough to fit Blue Diamond and Pearl at once. After Pearl stepped onto the platform a chime sounded and the world was replaced with a field of endless white. Seconds later, they emerged onto a completely different scene. Vaulted ceilings with four arches, each with a figure carved into it one of whom was Blue Diamond, covered the ceiling. Pillars dotted with the colors white, yellow, blue, and pink traveled as far as the eye could see. The platform they had emerged on was significantly larger than the one they had left on.

Jet had only moments to look over the scene as Blue Diamond and Pearl stepped off the platform and walked with purpose. Soon the multicolored décor was replaced with solid blue. Pointed arches with carvings all around separated each room, tapestries with bizarre alien figures fluttered by windows. It was like the building had been added to hundreds of times, with each room having a story of their own.

At last they came to a room similar to the control room on Klavius Seven’s moon, only grander. A long hallway full of murals along the walls led the way to the room, and sheer fabric curtains barred the way. They retracted at Blue’s approach, and fell back after Pearl had entered.

Blue immediately fell onto her couch, like she had been walking for too long and was exhausted. She held Jet’s bubble with one hand, and rested her head on her other. Pearl waited alongside the couch, nearby but not in contact, and together they waited. And waited.

Jet fell asleep at some point – all the blue around him made him sleepy easily – when he heard the familiar boots of Holly-Blue clack against the floor. He’d woken up past the formalities of audience procedure, requesting admission, granting, and the bluster thereafter. Blue Diamond held out the bubble hybrid so that Holly-Blue could see him.

Jet tried not to notice how visibly uncomfortable Holly-Blue was.

“There are to be no more jets manufactured,” Blue Diamond coldly announced. “This one has proven to be ill-suited for any role whatsoever. We’re lucky we only wasted resources on one such fossil.”

It was like Jet had missed a vine and was falling, but he couldn’t bubble his way to safety. Blue’s words made him feel like he was falling, forever.

“Of course, Blue Diamond, I’ll make sure that we try a… different method to deal with the rose quartz gems you’ve provided us.”

“See that you do. I don’t care if you have to implant them into humans wholesale, just get them out of bubbles and into service again. As for this one....” Blue Diamond tried to look at Jet with contempt, but he could tell how fragile the air of ‘domineering tyrant’ was with her. It gave him some hope that she was just acting that way because Holly-Blue was present. “Return it to Earth, on the next mission to capture new humans. When the mission is concluded, leave it behind.”

Blue Diamond’s bubble burst, and Jet flopped onto the ground. He felt listless, yet he also struggled to breathe. He couldn’t process what he’d heard at first. He had to have just heard her wrong.

“Get it out of my sight,” Blue Diamond said, like she was trying hard not to cry. “Take it away.”

“Of course, my diamond.” Holly-Blue gently crouched down and put her hands under Jet’s arms. “Come on Aych-Two, let’s get you up.” She lifted him up with ease and helped him stand. Immediately she had to fight him as energy came back to Jet who tried to reach out for Blue Diamond’s hand.

“Please! My diamond!” Jet tried to grab her fingers as the giant woman retracted her hand. “I’m sorry!”

“So am I,” Blue Diamond responded, her voice thick with suppressed emotion. “Now begone.”

“Come on, Aych-Two,” Holly-Blue gently scolded him as she hauled him away easily. “Don’t disrespect Blue Diamond any more than you have.”

Jet didn’t hear her, he just scrambled to try and get back to Blue Diamond, all while he screamed at the top his lungs how sorry he was, how he’d do better if she gave him another chance. He hoped that one of his pleas would get through to her.

But none did. Blue Diamond watched Jet be hauled away. She wept heavily while it happened, but she watched it nonetheless. And when he was gone, she watched to place he used to be while the happiness she had built up recently turned into ash.

–

Grey Diamond’s voice actress would likely be the late Della Reese. She’s got a very Greco-Roman look to her.


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter Ten -- On the Importance of Word Choice**

Jay-Eight held his choosened one’s hand while she dealt with a sudden burst of kicking from within. Zee-Ten was like Jay-Eight, both of ruddy skin and black hair, but hers was flowing while his was poofy gravity-defying ringlets. She wasn’t a fossil, as he was, but her forebears had been fed enough that Holly-Blue was certain their little one would be an ammonite anyway. His involvement was just to ‘seal the deal’, per her words. He was the display model, the template all other ammonites would be judged by -- Zee-Ten was similarly high quality for an unturned human -- Holly-Blue hoped for something marvelous with their little one.

The other ammonite parent finally arrived from his training session with the Little Voice, and stood next to his choosened partner. Around them were fossils of all kinds, and some unturned humans. Of particular interest was the wild human who had come to see how second-generation fossils were born. Holly-Blue had to leave suddenly, so her pearl oversaw the birthing rite.

“All are present,” said the waify Pearl in a ghost-like voice. Her eyes barely opened to look around and smiled faintly. “Are all ready?”

Nods of assent came from the expectant parents. The audience around them let loose some cheers to encourage the human mothers who seemed worried about the rite. Jay-Eight wished he could say he understood their misgivings -- but Zee-Ten had tried to explain it multiple times, and he didn’t understand. She said she was afraid of losing herself in the rite, but Jay-Eight knew they wouldn’t combine enough to form a single mind.

“Very well.” Pearl clapped her hands to silence the gallery. “Let the rite of fusion commence.” The non-participating humans and fossils bowed their heads in respect of Holly-Blue’s representative, who in turn represented their diamond, Blue Diamond -- the Diamond of Beauty. “Ay-Nine and Vee-Ten? You may begin.”

Jay-Eight gave his fellow ammonite a thumbs-up as the pale-skinned fossil picked up his choosened mate in his arms. Ay-Nine began to spin her around, and drew her toward him as bright light enveloped them. For a moment a huge humanoid figure began to take shape, with two ammonite gemstones orbiting around in their shared light. But as quickly as they began to combine, they shrank down and split apart again.

The air was filled with the sound of wailing as Ay-Nine held his mate in his arms, who in turn held their little one in hers. Zee-Ten dashed over to look at the little one along with the new mother, and Jay-Eight did the same to clap his fellow fossil on the shoulder.

“Ahem?” The hybrids and humans were allowed a moment of excitement after the successful rite before Pearl cleared her throat. From her gemstone, pearl produced a fluffy blue towel for the little one. Vee-Ten shakily walked over to Holly-Blue’s representative and passed her little one along. Pearl wrapped the little girl up in the towel and passed her back. “We have a new little sister, everyone. Per the tradition, the mother may designate the first half of her name, and the father the second half.”

The parents named their little one Ehks-Eleven, and waved as an amethyst took the little one to the nursery. In a few years time, Ekhs-Eleven would be returned to the containment area to meet her parents, and possibly her older siblings. Vee-Ten and Ay-Nine shared a last moment of cuddle-time before they parted ways -- their period of choosening had ended. Vee-Ten left to sit among the ambers where her leftover hurts could be healed.

Jay-Eight and Zee-Ten took up their positions to be the next to fulfill the rite. Jay-Eight picked up Zee-Ten in his arms and spun her around to begin the process. His gem lit up, and reached out to Zee-Ten to begin the process. It took perhaps a little longer than Jay-Eight was comfortable with for Zee-Ten and him to combine -- but when they did he could feel the third presence among them. It was his job to part that presence from Zee-Ten without hurting her and arrange it so that when they came apart she would be holding their little one.

To his embarrassment, he accidentally put the little one in her arms upside-down. Everyone had a laugh as another amethyst was called in to carry the newborn Ar-Four to the nursery.

Before Zee-Ten went to go sit with the ambers, Jay-Eight hugged her. “I hope we’re choosened for each other again, I liked being with you.”

Zee-Ten stuck her tongue out at him as she walked off to the ambers. “It was fun. If it happens again, it happens again.”

Jay-Eight had been all smiles before, but after he heard that his smile began to fade. Had Zee-Ten not enjoyed being choosened for him as much as he’d enjoyed being choosened for her? Was it something he’d done, or didn’t do? He retreated to his favorite tree to think while the other fossils gushed about Bee-Four’s latest fight with Jasper, or another gembone who summoned their weapon.

He’d been the second to summon his weapon, but it wasn’t as impressive as Bee-Four’s helmet. Jay-Eight could call fabric from his gem, sparkling grey with multi-color three-toed footprints of strange animals he’d never seen before, and have it do things for him. A long, narrow section could be tossed to wrap around things -- which was how he got to his favorite tree. A large, wide square could cover an object and make it disappear until Jay-Eight called it back. Jay-Eight could already see how he could use it in a gladitorial arena for his diamond’s pleasure.

But those thoughts distracted Jay-Eight from his goal -- what had he done wrong with Zee-Ten? Was she even unhappy with him? They’d done everything they were supposed to do, make a little one, cuddle, spend time together, talk about what they hoped for the little one to be like, and he explained the rite of fusion to her. He paused and reconsidered the last point. Had he been wrong to fuse with her? But how else would their little one have come out? The human way? That caused so much hurt -- and Holly-Blue said it wasn’t safe for non-ambers to even try.

His thoughts were distracted when he saw a blue figure through the trees below. Holly-Blue! Surely she would know! Jay-Eight called up a long cape of his fabric to wrap around his neck and hold taut with his hands, then lept from the tree to glide down to the lower trees. There was someone with Holly-Blue, though Jay-Eight couldn’t clearly see whom. He lept from tree to tree, opal instincts let him know which branches would make a noise and which would hold strong under his weight.

Eventually, he got a good enough look at the other figure to guess who it was: Aych-Two! Little brother! Aych-Two had been taken off to meet Blue Diamond shortly after he was returned to the adult enclosure. But he was back! Jay-Eight couldn’t wait to talk to him again, he and their parents had barely gotten to know the new fossil before he was presented and whisked away.

Something was amiss, Jay-Eight quickly learned that. Holly-Blue had to physically drag Aych-Two through the containment area, and when he got close enough he could hear someone crying. Holly-Blue was _loud_ when she cried, so it had to be Aych-Two.

Holly-Blue set him down on the ground next to where the lake met the enclosure wall. “Al-alright Aych-Two, stay here.” The agate seemed quite out of sorts. “Try not to interact too much with the other fossils or humans, alright? I’ll… I’ll check the schedules to see when the next human collection is to be done. Once we know how long you have, I can adjust your routine.”

Aych-Two sat with his arms wrapped around his folded legs, with his head buried in his knees.

“I’m… I’m sorry, Aych-Two.” Holly-Blue’s shoulders shook a little, but Jay-Eight couldn’t tell what face she made. “I… I made you wrong, and now you’re being punished for that. I’ll make sure they leave you somewhere where you can be accepted. And this… this won’t happen again.” Holly-Blue turned to leave, but paused and looked back at Aych-Two. “Holly-Blue still loves you, Aych-Two. I know it won’t help much… but I don’t care what Blue Diamond thinks of you.” Then she left, and Jay-Eight could see how hard Holly-Blue had set herself to fight the urge to cry.

When she was gone, Jay-Eight crept closer to his brother, and dropped to the ground. Air moved around him and kept him from falling too fast and injuring himself. A protection of the zoo, like the Little Voice, he thought and didn’t wonder too much about it. Jay-Eight touched down without a noise, but accompanied by a breeze.

Aych-Two had changed clothes since last Jay-Eight saw him. More indicative of Blue Diamond’s service than the average fossil uniform.

“Little brother?” Jay-Eight asked, and hesitantly approached.

“Don’t,” Aych-Two said back. He tried to snarl, but he lacked the requisite meanness. “I’m bad. And you shouldn’t be around me. Holly-Blue said so.” The younger fossil hugged himself tighter, tried to make himself smaller. “Blue Diamond said so.”

The tone Aych-Two said the last part made Jay-Eight recoil. That was a tone he’d only heard in Jasper, Holly-Blue called it ‘bitter’. Against Aych-Two’s demands, Jay-Eight approached closer. “No, Holly-Blue didn’t. I overheard what she said. But Blue Diamond? Come on, she was with you for months, you must have misheard her. Our diamond -- “

“_Your diamond_,” Aych-Two said with that same bitter tone. “She doesn’t want me. She told Holly-Blue not to make any more fossils like me. I’m bad, I’m defective. And they’re going to leave me on a planet I’ve never been to before when they send someone out to collect humans.”

Jay-Eight got close enough to almost reach out and touch his brother when the younger fossil lashed out and slapped his hand away. For the first time, Jay-Eight got to look at his brother’s face. Bags under his eyes, the whites in his eyeballs replaced with veiny pink-red, and a general pallor to his ruddy skin. Something was terribly wrong.

“Brother,” Jay-Eight pleaded.

“Don’t.” Aych-Two returned to his curled-up state. “If you talk to me too much, you’ll miss me when I’m gone. If you touch me, it’ll be even worse.”

Not for the first time, Jay-Eight realized he didn’t know how to talk to someone who clearly needed him to. But this time -- he knew someone who _did_. He turned and ran for the containment door, with air of the zoo pushing him to move faster.

His dedication and fervor startled many of the gems he passed on his way out of the containment area. Humans were required to stay in the containment area, hybrids had the freedom to leave, but most stayed anyway. He was perhaps the first hybrid to choose to leave.

It didn’t take him long to listen for whispers that sounded like Jasper, then he followed them and found himself at the quartz barracks. Jasper was in the midst of her punishment, polishing an amethyst guard.

“Jasper!” Jay-Eight demanded and stomped his feet to plant himself against a charge. It’s what they had trained for, and what he expected her to do on seeing him automatically. “I need you to come with me!”

The giant quartz continued polishing the amethyst like she heard nothing. It was decidedly awkward, as all the other quartzes in the barracks had stopped to see what the ammonite wanted with them.

When her job was completed, and the giant quartz put the polishing towel back on the stand, she glanced at Jay-Eight and growled. “Get cracked.”

Jay-Eight ominously set his gem to glow and spoke with a haunting voice filled with melodic echoes. “If you would rather it happen this way -- “ He had to side-step a sudden punch attack from Jasper, which some of the amethysts cheered for him on.

“Is that how you ammonites are going to behave? Use your powers on people when you don’t get your way?” Jasper curled her lip in disgust. “Pathetic.”

“Right now, I don’t care if I’m pathetic or not.” Jay-Eight was frazzled by going so far out of his comfort zone so quickly, it showed in his movements and his appearance slightly. His hair was rather expressive. “Right now, Blue Diamond did something to my brother which makes him hate himself and you’re the only gem I know who hates herself too. I need you to come with me and talk to him!”

The perfect quartz looked down her gem-nose at the ammonite with disdain. “I’ve only just started acknowledging how much I hate myself, monster. What makes you think I can say anything that would help anyone? What makes you think I can help anyone when I can’t even help myself?” She sniffed and turned her back on the ammonite. “For what it’s worth, I get it. Censure from a diamond hurts. But you’d be better off just being there to stop him doing something crazy.”

Jay-Eight pulled at his hair in frustration, turned, and stormed out of the barracks. He ignored the amethyts who gave him pitying looks as he left, and tried to think of any other way to help his brother out.

He walked the whole circuit ring around the zoo, while he thought about it. Then he remembered what Holly-Blue had said, about the human retrieval schedule. That paired with Jasper’s words to him, and he had a plan.

Jay-Eight quickly sought out Holly-Blue and masked how he felt with a broad grin and happy-go-lucky attitude that was his default state.

\--

Holly-Blue had looked through everything on file she had that could -- conceivably -- help Aych-Two in the wild. She’d dusted off mothballed gem tech, she’d fabricated stories about the need to ease her fossils into gem society with minor gadgets to requisition items. Two of her ambers had somehow acquired advanced mathematics which was spreading among her fossils -- while that was cause for alarm, it gave her another avenue to increase the tech available to her by way of enrichment.

White Diamond ended up requisitioning some ambers some weeks after their return for another experiment, but by then she had humans and fossils making number games to teach each other. Aych-Two remained solidly anti-social per her requests, with the exception of Jay-Eight. She saw him try multiple times to get Aych-Two to socialize, but to no avail. It made sense as to why he would request to go on the next human collection mission, to get away. Holly-Blue had almost not granted it, given she had to send Aych-Two off on the mission as well. But the display model ammonite needed to show the others how it was done _sometime_, it was best to get it out of the way.

Blue Diamond just wanted Aych-Two gone. Fine. Whatever. Let her diamond squander resources because she couldn’t see potential properly. Holly-Blue wouldn’t let one of her fossils go into the wild unprepared. Ancient saucer-style colony ships of Blue Diamond’s had been brought to the zoo on the pretext of teaching her fossils how to pilot. The old stone craft weren’t warp-capable, they had been outmoded since the turn of Era Two, and in general they were considered useless. But they were big. Big enough for a hybrid like Aych-Two to live comfortably for a few thousand years. A few knick-knacks, some brikabrak, and there was a good chance Aych-Two could survive in the wild.

“What are you doing?”

Holly-Blue looked up to see Sagenite Agate approach her. The yellow commander gestured to where Holly-Blue’s troops were attaching towing cables from a Roaming Eye to an ancient blue saucer craft.

The agate rolled her eyes. “My display model ammonite is going on a mission to capture some wild humans soon. We’ve been ordered to speed up the capture rate in anticipation of the next zoo facility. Roaming Eyes are fine for small amounts, but a larger space to contain them in will be necessary.”

“That won’t be necessary,” the one-eyed gem groused. “My diamond has authorized the use of the Hand of Authority to capture humans, provided some are tithed to her and White Diamond. The rest of the Authority wants fossils of their own, it seems.”

Holly-Blue grit her teeth at her plans being thwarted by the involvement of the diamonds. “How generous of her,” she said with faux-enthusiasm. “I’d be happy to provide a copy of my notes, to accelerate the production of fossils for Yellow and White Diamond. But starting fresh from unturned humans will take a few thousand years to see results.”

Sagenite Agate flicked her wrist dismissively. “We will see about that. Just inform your troops to report to the Hand of Authority when the mission is set to go ahead.”

Holly-Blue nodded and looked to glare at the Hand of Authority that loomed outside her station in a parking orbit. It would be more difficult to provide for Aych-Two on a vessel of a completely different diamond. Difficult, but not impossible.

First she had to teach her fossils how to pilot a ship, then convince Sagenite Agate to allow one of them to pilot the ship instead of their usual nephrite. To her surprise, it turned out to be an amber who had the technological proficiency to make Sagenite agree to the setup. Then she had to have her rambunctious soldiers make repeated mishaps occur to cover unauthorized shipments to the Hand. Once all was said and done, she had to make a show for Sagenite Agate when the mission began.

“Listen up, layabouts!” Holly-Blue shouted in front of her assembled amethyst and jasper squad to accompany the fossils. Behind her, beside her pearl, was a gembone -- Bee-Four. “This is an important mission. You’re going out with the express purpose of capturing as many humans as possible. We’re going to jump-start the fossil production of Yellow and White Diamond if this mission succeeds. To that end, you’re taking two of my display model gembones and an amber.” Holly-Blue gestured to Bee-Four. “Bee-Four, Jay-Eight, and Eye-Five all will be with you to watch, learn, and if the stars are kind _improve_ on your methods.” With the yellow agate watching from afar, Holly-Blue made a show of glaring at each of her quartz soldiers. “If you damage my fossils in a way the amber can’t fix, or diamonds-forbid _lose_ one of them? Don’t bother coming back -- I will shatter you myself! Now go!”

Holly-Blue watched them leave with Aych-Two in tow, confident that she’d arranged things so that her only jet would be taken care of.

Imagine her surprise, not a week later, when the long-distance monitoring for the Hand of Authority deployed to the Earth reported catastrophic systems failure and no response from any communication requests. A replay of the ship’s internal cameras showed a riot of the captive humans against the quartz soldiers, before the explosion cut it off.


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter Eleven -- Abductors**

The Hand of Authority shook as it entered Earth’s atmosphere. Inside the ship, most of the shaking was negated by the inertial dampeners. But the sheer size of the ship meant that it couldn’t completely negate the shakes and rattles. Jet stayed in his cell and didn’t move on his own, but the shaking caused him to scoot around. It was apparently quite entertaining as Jay-Eight giggled on the other side of the cell doorway while he watched.

The cell wasn’t even closed -- it had been modified for fossils and had many holes along the frame where bars would emerge. But it was where the quartz soldiers had put him, so its where he stayed.

“You’re not going to go away, are you?” Jet asked him, morose as he scooted about the cell.

Jay-Eight shook his head without looking away. “I did once. And when you came back, you were this.” The ammonite gestured to Jet’s person with his hand then placed both on his waist and bent forward. “I’d rather it not get worse without me there to help, little brother.”

Jet glowered and continued to scoot about. “Well, once I’m on Earth there won’t be much you can do about it.”

Jay-Eight grinned, and Jet got the feeling his older brother had some clever idea.

“What? You think you can come with me?” Jet forced out a laugh, mocking the notion. “You’re the display model. You heard how Holly-Blue was -- if you don’t go back with them, they’ll be shattered!”

Jay-Eight’s smile vanished over the course of seconds. “I’m okay with that.” It sounded like Jay-Eight wanted to convince himself just as much as he wanted to convince Jet.

The younger fossil looked up at him, disbelieving and angry. He had the memories of Blue Diamond’s despair at having almost no choice but to shatter him, and that this whole affair was her desperate alternative to it fresh in his mind. Like all things related to Blue Diamond, it haunted him and would allow no rest. “Why? Don’t you know what being shattered means?”

When they were Grey Diamond, he could feel what it felt like to be Blue Diamond. It was like he felt each gem in his hands as they broke apart. He felt Blue Diamond hate the gems that made it necessary, he felt the hate that clawed at her for wanting there to be another way, and he felt something _like_ hate but colder. More distant. And aimed at someone that he couldn’t imagine because their fusion didn’t last long enough.

Jay-Eight narrowed his eyes at Jet. “I learned from Eye-Five what it means. We come from shattered gems -- you know that.”

“But do you know what it means to _be shattered_?” Jet struggled to his feet despite the ship shaking. Once he stood it was a lot easier to stay in one place. “It means being broken up. Your mind in pieces, _you_ in pieces. And nothing can ever bring you back -- even if all your pieces are brought together.” The younger brother glared balefully at his elder.

Jay-Eight joined in on the glare. “Well, what do you expect me to do? Let them leave you there? Out in the wild where wild humans could kill and eat you? You remember Holly-Blue’s lessons, there’s no daily fruit on Earth! You have to kill what you want to eat!” The ammonite called forth a sash-wide segment of his cloth gem weapon. “Do you even have a weapon? What are you going to kill your food with? Your **hands**?!”

Jet and Jay-Eight continued to glare at each other, but as the effect wore on Jet’s outrage began to crumble. Rage and sorrow came in waves, and as it happened his rage wore off as a new wave of sorrow rolled in. First he couldn’t meet his brother’s eyes, then he fell to his knees when he couldn’t stand anymore, and finally a fresh bout of crying started up. He wanted to tell his brother to let him die in the wilderness, but Jay-Eight wouldn’t listen. Jet didn’t even know _why_, the brothers had barely interacted before Blue Diamond took him away.

“You’re young,” Jay-Eight said as if he could read his brother’s mind. “You haven’t seen little ones go off to the nursery and come back yet. We get so excited to meet who our little brothers and sisters are, maybe even introduce them to our little ones. I sent my little one off to the nursery the day you came back like… this.”

Jet felt a displacement of air and glanced over to see his brother seated next to him. There was no smile on his face, but there was pity in his eyes.

“I want to know you, but this isn’t you. Someone did this to you -- Blue Diamond, I guess.” Jay-Eight shrugged. “Don’t know. Don’t care. But I want to get to know the real you. And if that means I have to go with you into the wild -- fine. That’s what I’ll do.”

Jet scowled at him. “That’s a terrible decision, frankly. You don’t know if I’m worth it.”

“No, I don’t!” There was a sudden note of levity in Jay-Eight’s voice. “But ammonites are supposed to be gladiators. Nothing in that job description requires us to make good long-term decisions.” The ammonite stuck his tongue out at his brother and threw a blanket-sized swath of his gem fabric over Jet. “And I just felt the ship stop shaking, so we probably are approaching the target zone.”

Jet watched his brother get up and leave the cell. He didn’t activate the bars when he could, he kept walking instead. The outcast fossil was left there with an improvised blanket, so he wrapped it around himself tighter and laid down to rest.

\--

Once Jay-Eight had joined the group, Amethyst 8XJ barked out her first order as commander of the mission: “Gather round, everyone!”

8XJ was the shortest amethyst on the mission, but that didn’t bother anyone from the zoo. Carnelian usually called the shots when Holly-Blue wasn’t around, and she was the shortest quartz on the station. Technically, Bee-Four should have commanded the mission as he was an agate. Amethysts were squad-level soldiers who could command a unit in a pinch, jaspers were heavies that tended to get too lost in a fight to command, but agates could keep their heads in a fight.

Once the quartzes and the fossils were assembled in the control room, 8XJ tapped a green panel to change into a display screen. It showed the Earth’s surface in different shades of green for land and water, with bright yellow indicating human populations. “Alright, so our last batch came from here.” She tapped a corner of the inland sea of the super-continent. “Now there are some pretty large population centers in that area according to the ship -- but there’s an even bigger one over here.” She dragged her finger over to the edge of the super-continent, where a pair of peninsulas jutted off the coastline. “There’s over sixty million humans in this area alone. That’s almost as much as the whole rest of the planet combined.”

Jasper 7XF, a massive slab of quartz with more dark maroon stripes than orange skin, whistled at that number.

“Right?” 8XL turned to look at her squad and her fossil VIPs. “I don’t know why we haven’t been pulling from there before! Well, we’re doing it now.” 8XL thumped her chest and put on a confident face. “Our mission is to get as many humans as we possibly can -- we have enough cells for two thousand humans, plus standing room for another one and a half. If we had more ammonites, I’d say we could get this bucket to _capacity_ with humans. But we’ll have to make do with the cells we’ve got.” She looked over at the ammonite for the mission, Jay-Eight. “You good to get started?”

Jay-Eight took a deep breath and warmed up his voice a little. “I think I can manage,” he boasted with a wink.

“I like that confidence!” She gave him a thumb’s up and turned to the gembone. “Bee-Four, we’re trusting you to keep Jay-Eight safe while he’s keeping the humans under control. Can you do that?”

Bee-Four’s response was to immediately summon his helmet, as easily as breathing. The three-horned face looked back at 8XJ with the kind of ‘Imma wreck your whole week’ glare that she’d only ever seen in _that_ Jasper. “I give the rowdy ones this look, right? I think I got it.”

It put her ever so slightly ill-at-ease, how easily he switched that expression off. “Oh...kay, that’s confidence too! Yeah.” She coughed and hastily looked away, to the last fossil. “Eye-Five, you cool with piloting the ship into position? The loading bay doors still giving you trouble?”

The blonde fossil shook her head. “No, they’re working fine now. As it turned out, an organic somehow got stuck in the door and decomposed. The acids in its body damaged the door, which was why it wasn’t working properly. I cleaned it out, fixed the door, and all’s well.”

A slightly bigger, slightly pinker amethyst -- 8XG -- chuckled. “A pilot and a mechanic? Can we have her on all our missions?”

8XJ grinned, glad to get past the period of awkwardness. “Alright! Everything’s looking good! Let’s go get us some humans!”

\--

Yuuki hadn’t expected youkai to attack so openly, or so peacefully. When her father and grandfather had told stories about youkai that attacked settlements she’d never heard of, there was always widespread destruction. The men of the village would fight honorably until the youkai left or the Four Goddesses descended from heaven to drive them back.

She could only learn the stories from her father and grandfather since they knew how to read and write. Yuuki was the first of her brothers and sisters to learn, because of her deformity. But she had such skill teaching it to her father’s second wife and her younger siblings, that the village chief had asked her father to allow Yuuki to marry his youngest son and teach his household to read and write. She never asked how her father or grandfather knew the language if they were only farmers. She’d seen grandfather look west, toward China wistfully one time when she’d asked, and that seemed to be his answer.

Her deformity was that the world was silent for her. She couldn’t listen to the words people could speak, she couldn’t hear the song of birds; anything at all. Some noises make vibrations she could feel -- which was why she loved the drums and big bells used in festivals.

She thought, perhaps the Four Goddesses had given her the deformity so that she could be awake when the youkai came for her and her village. They were a large village, large enough that other village chiefs treated their chief like their superior, and obeyed his command. But when the enormous hand youkai turned the night sky green as it descended from heaven, even her chief became an obedient slave. There was some magic going on that Yuuki couldn’t perceive. In the middle of her lesson, her nieces and nephews, her husband and brothers in law, and her village chief all turned toward the green light. Then they stood and walked together from the room.

Yuuki followed them and saw that the whole village had become the same way. Elders, young ones. Mothers with babies in their arms. Soldiers, merchants. That one peddler who came from the strange land of ‘Straya’ with giant snake eggs. Even her father, grandfather, and siblings!

It didn’t take long for Yuuki to see the source of the magic. It was a youkai who appeared to be a man -- barely dressed and beautiful beyond words. She knew he wasn’t really a human as he had a glowing mark in his chest -- all shapeshifted youkai had a piece of themselves that revealed their nature. The Child Goddess often delighted in her shapeshifting powers, per the legends. The youkai’s mouth worked like he spoke, and Yuuki guessed that he had some magic in his words.

The giant green hand had laid itself flat on the docks as if offered to the people who walked toward it. A hole opened up in the hand’s fingertips, which people walked into without thinking. What was bizarre about the affair was how the youkai exclusively wanted humans. Yuuki watched as horses, cows and wild boars emerged from the farms to follow the humans, but were commanded back.

A second youkai stood with the first. In the same revealing dress, and with a similar beauty of body except for his face. His face was of a skinless skull with a beaked mouth, a horn for a nose, and two horns above his empty eye sockets. Clearly, this was the first youkai’s minion. A soldier to set upon humans that couldn’t, or wouldn’t, obey.

Suddenly, Yuuki feared she would be spotted as not under the spell. So she walked with the rest of her village. However, she stopped and took a rock from the road as she walked. Then she hid it in her voluminous sleeves as she approached the hand. Her heart beat extremely fast in her chest -- she thought she would die from it, as she walked into the giant fingertip with her family around her.

The inside of the finger was strange. No blood or bone. Instead, their feet echoed off the floor like the surface of a giant drum. Every surface gleamed. Then she saw them. They were youkai of a different sort than the first two Yuuki had seen them. Their skin was pink or purple, or orange and red striped -- they were all women with flowing hair and a mark which showed them for what they were. They watched the flood of humans walk past them with wide grins, and even offered physical affection to the first two youkai Yuuki had seen. She only needed to look at them interact to know what this whole thing was.

The way they interacted, it was the same as elder siblings praising a younger one for completing a difficult task for the first time. Yuuki fumed at the sight of it. Her whole village was to be dragged away to be eaten or worse by these youkai, and they treated it like an accomplishment to be celebrated. The Four Goddesses wouldn’t arrive fast enough -- all the people Yuuki had grown up with would be gobbled up and gone by the time they arrived.

Yuuki waited in the crowd of hypnotized people while her friends and family were parceled up and put into larders with bars to keep them secure once the spell wore off. The hand around them shuddered, pleased for having humans to feed it again, perhaps. Yuuki just needed to wait for her turn.

When it came time for Yuuki’s group to be fed into the larder, Yuuki rushed the bewitching youkai once its back was turned. She took the rock from her sleeve and struck him in the back of the head with it.

He hit the ground, unconscious. There was blood on the rock, and blood on the floor around him as Yuuki stood, victorious.

She was happy that her family was freed. As she watched, they came to their senses, they saw where they were, and they were rightfully afraid or angry.

Of course, the youkai’s older sisters didn’t like that. The last thing Yuuki saw was one of the striped sisters rapidly approach her, and grabbed her by the shoulders. And the last thing she felt was when the tiger-striped youkai tore her in half.

\--

Bee-Four was a failure. That thought replied in his head rapidly as he watched Jay-Eight get knocked unconscious by a wild human woman. Jasper 7XF dealt with the wild human while Bee-Four was stunned into inaction. Amethyst 8XJ shook him out of his stupor and barked orders at him.

“We got the humans, get Jay-Eight to Eye-Five **now!**”

Bee-Four nodded numbly and scooped up his fellow fossil and ran away. He tried to ignore the feeling of blood on his shoulder as he carried Jay-Eight in his arms toward the bridge. He tried to ignore the sounds of screams and rage from the wild humans outside their cages as Jay-Eight’s spell wore off. However, what he couldn’t ignore was the knowledge of his failure. All of this was because he didn’t notice a human had escaped Jay-Eight’s spell somehow and got to attack him.

“Eye-Five!” He shouted and dismissed his helmet. “Eye-Five!”

The amber met him outside the control room and immediately began to gather resin in her hands when she saw Jay Eight and the blood. Bee-Four held Jay-Eight steady while Eye-Five healed his head. He was fortunate she needed to hum while she healed, because he didn’t feel like he could answer questions from the amber just yet. It was taking all his self-control not to cry in frustration at how badly he’d failed. The quartzes would need to damage or ruin humans in order to corral them, which meant even if everything went great from that moment on, he’d be a bad example for other gembones.

Some ‘display model’ he turned out to be.

A trio of high-pitched pings came from the control room just as Jay-Eight started to wake up. Eye-Five turned and looked at the control panel in fright, then ran for it.

“What’s wrong? Did I fall asleep?” Jay-Eight groggily asked as he held his head. “Ow, I’ve got such a headache.” Then he noticed Bee-Four holding him and smirked. “You know, if you wanted to practice choosening you just needed to ask -- “

“Now is a really bad time,” Bee-Four snapped. “We need you to get back over to the humans and -- “

** “Attention, all hands,”** the ship’s internal communications system rang through the halls and the fossil’s earrings. ** “The pilot has detected a hostile lifeform on a collision course with this craft. Please brace for impact.”**

Bee-Four had time to look into the control room and saw a hulking black figure with massive hair, two faces, and a two-handed sword of pure fire approach the ship’s cameras rapidly before a great screeching shake sent him falling backward. Jay-Eight, still in Bee-Four’s arms got tangled in the gembone from the initial fall and the shift in gravity that followed. Whatever had hit the ship had knocked out inertial dampening.

Eye-Five returned from the control room and helped the men get to their feet. “We need to get to the quartzes and then the escape pods,” she said calmly but with visible unease in her face. “That thing hit the backup reactor, that’s going to blow in a few minutes and it’ll knock out the main reactor. The ship will crash and our current crash course puts us in the middle of the ocean.”

Jay-Eight got visibly freaked out and dashed off. The other two fossils followed him but found it difficult. Whatever had attacked the ship _was still_ attacking the ship. More than once, Bee-Four and Eye-Five had to stop just around the corner from Jay-Eight as the blade of the hostile creature’s sword cut into the ship. The heat it radiated was a problem for Eye-Five, so Bee-Four acted as a shield between her and the furnace-sword. Gembones had heat resistance for days.

When they caught up to Jay-Eight they found he hadn’t gone to the quartzes at all, but grabbed Aych-Two from his cell. The younger fossil was afraid and cowered behind his elder brother when the creature attacked the ship.

Bee-Four didn’t even think of being outraged at Jay-Eight for the detour -- he had forgotten Aych-Two was aboard. “Are you okay, Aych-Two? Do you need Eye-Five to heal you?”

“He’s fine,” Jay-Eight barked. “Let’s get off this ship before it -- “

Naturally, the backup reactor exploded at that precise moment. Bee-Four and Eye-Five were able to stand through the wave of pressurized air that accompanied the reactor’s explosion, but the fossil brothers weren’t. Bee-Four had to catch them with his arms when they were sent flying past him, and Eye-Five had to hold him steady.

Without a word, Bee-Four carried the fossil brothers under his arms while they ran for the escape pods. When they got to the section of the ship where they would be launched from, they found only one amethyst waiting for them. 8XJ -- she looked tired and annoyed.

When she looked up and saw them, she breathed a sigh of relief. “You guys are okay. Great. Where are the others?”

The fossils looked around and cringed back a bit. “We haven’t seen any other gems besides you.”

8XJ looked confused and opened the door that the fossils had just come through. “But… I sent 8XG and 8XL after you guys. They should’ve found you.” A great and fiery orange sword being stabbed through the hallway she looked down reminded her of the more pressing issues. “Right! Can’t wait! They’re tough rocks, they’ll survive!” 8XJ closed the door, turned and stomped her foot on the ground. A yellow-green gelatinous mass emerged from the floor, enveloped all of them, and sucked them down into the ship’s inner workings. They emerged into a cramped room with two rows of seating. A front row which included Eye-Five and 8XJ in front of the control devices, and a back row where the three male fossils sat uselessly. A sudden rush indicated their pod was in motion, and the yellow-green empty space in front of them peeled back to reveal a window.

Bee-Four got a chance to see the Hand of Authority trail into the planet below them with smoke and debris falling from it like the tail of a comet, riden by the black giant that had downed the ship. The giant saw their pod leave, turned, and hurled her sword at them like it was a spear.

Eye-Five immediately took the controls from 8XJ and had their pod evade the attack, barely.

“What about the wild humans?” Aych-Two asked as the Hand fell to Earth faster than their pod.

“What _about_ the wild humans?” 8XJ asked back, low and dangerous. “We were attacked. Even if we wanted to put them back, we couldn’t. Taking them in the pods would only get them hurt. We lost half of them to hull breaches when that thing started cutting into us, anyway. We gotta focus on _us_ right now.” She turned to Eye-Five and her tone was noticeably warmer. “What about it? You got this?”

“No,” Eye-Five said back, strained. “The magnetosphere is trying to push us to the poles -- the ship couldn’t launch us fast enough to compensate.”

Bee-Four watched as the display started to be covered with more and more white particles as they descended the atmosphere. The miracle of snow was lost on him as their pod careened toward the edge of a massive bay in the north-east of the super-continent.

Welcome to Earth, he thought morosely. Where one failure leads to tragedy.


	12. Chapter 12

**Chapter Twelve -- No Way Out**

Blue Diamond found her desire to continue her colony dwindle each time a task needed her attention. Every time she had to be pulled out of her misery to do miserable work, she found the desire to do anything wither away. It got to the point where she, in a moment of pique, snapped at an aquamarine that had called her directly for orders on what to do with her colony next: “Fine -- you want someone who can hold your hand through this then my pearl will oversee the colony! You all take your orders from her until I say otherwise!”

And it worked.

Whenever she came back to reality, she saw her pearl in a conversation with the colonization staff, or drawing up plans for new structures. Blue would never have thought to connect several spires together by lace-thin bridges of crystal, it was beautiful. It gave Blue the time she needed to accept that Jet was gone, and that it was necessary for him to be gone. It gave her time to forget how wonderful it felt to be Grey Diamond with him.

So the days went, in a blur of momentary periods of awareness and stretches of overwhelming sorrow. Until one day something snapped Blue out of her despair. Her pearl had been with her for millennia and had dutifully obeyed her orders and kept herself demure throughout. Blue was shocked after a call which her pearl fielded, to hear the petit servant hiss through her teeth as if she held back tears. It was impossible, Blue’s tears poured through Pearl’s eyes, but the attempt drew Blue Diamond’s attention.

“Pearl, what’s wrong?”

Blue Diamond’s pearl dismissed the diamond-shaped communication window and turned to her diamond in a salute. Blue had never seen Pearl’s composure so _brittle_, that she visibly struggled to hold the salute and her posture.

“My diamond,” the servant choked out. “Your jet was taken on a ship to retrieve some humans. But the humans escaped containment, and overwhelmed the ship’s crew.”

A yawning chasm had opened up under Blue Diamond, and drew every scrap of warmth from her light. Frozen and afraid, she listened to Pearl speak.

The servant bent at the waist in a bow, and without Blue’s power tears dropped to the floor around her. “The ship was lost with all hands. He’s gone. He’s… dead.”

Dead wasn’t like being shattered, Blue remembered. Dead was what worse -- while shattered, fragments of the gem continued to exist. But dead was final, an end, and uniquely organic.

Blue Diamond laughed. She’d done all that, suffered for weeks because of the mere _chance_ of fusion happening again, so that Jet could live on Earth and perhaps find new happiness. All for nothing. All her pain was for _nothing_. Blue Diamond laughed as she cried.

It hurt as bad as when she’d gotten the news about Pink. But she laughed and she cried anyway. The same sick drama had unfolded again. Blue found happiness that was taken away, again. She was doomed to play out this purgatorial cycle forever, taunted by happiness that was yanked away.

She wasn’t sure what did it, but a spark of _something_ lit up the ocean of despair that had built up within her. A threshold of grief that had been met, and reached critical mass. Pink was gone, because of Blue. Jet was gone, because of Blue. As the executor of law in the empire, more and more gems would be gone because of Blue. Yellow, White, the whole empire, would be better off if it was _Blue_ who was gone. It all made sense.

With deadened eyes, she looked over at her pearl, who still struggled not to weep. “Go ahead, Pearl,” she said, softly. “I think… I’ve run out of tears to cry.” She smiled, sad, as her pearl looked up. “You mourn for him… I’ll get to work, how’s that?”

“Get to work on what, my diamond?” Her pearl turned to look at the display of the incomplete colony. “That?”

“Well, yes, eventually.” Eyes dead of all emotion, Blue Diamond sat straight for the first time in years. “But also what comes after. There are new gems to produce, resources need to be stockpiled for the next colony. So on and so forth.” Absently, she rubbed at her gemstone and thought of how she could make her disconnected thoughts come true without irreparably damaging the empire. “Is there anything that needs to be done right now?”

Pearl met Blue Diamond’s emotionally dead eyes and gently shook her head.

“Alright. Cry as much or as little as you like. I think I will try dreaming again.” Blue Diamond closed her eyes and reclined on her throne. “Maybe I’ll be inspired by one of them.”

Her dreams weren’t inspirational. But they did let her see Pink and Jet again.

\--

There’d been humans on the ship. The Homeworld ship had come to steal a bunch of humans. Amethyst didn’t know what to make of that. When they’d seen a giant handship in the sky, Garnet, Pearl, and Rose had all acted like it was _the_ worst possible outcome, and that it needed to be dealt with _right away_.

It was only because Amethyst didn’t care as much that she’d noticed a human fly out of a hole in the ship when they’d torn into it. While the others were focused on the ship and using the sword, she pulled her part of Obsidian to bubble humans where she saw them. Eventually, the part of Obsidian that was Sapphire noticed what was going on and helped her, which in turn helped Ruby and Pearl realize there were humans who needed saving.

But Rose couldn’t let go. She kept attacking the ship even as Obsidian began to fall apart from being pulled in two directions. It was weird, Amethyst didn’t even know Rose could be _that_ mad before.

With Pearl, Amethyst, and Garnet on the same side, they had no trouble bubbling humans. The trouble was they had no idea where the humans _came from_ to put them back. As the ship fell back to Earth, the five-gem fusion split. Obsidian became Alexandrite who focused on the humans while Rose went down with the ship.

After they were planetside again, Amethyst split off from Alexandrite who became Sardonyx so that she could fly around and look for an island to put the humans on. There closest islands capable of sustaining humans were those two big islands where giant eagles lived. They were gonna need to get some swords to fight the giant eagles, but humans seemed pretty good at making swords.

So after the humans were unbubbled and put on the island of giant eagles, Pearl and Amethyst walked with Garnet to where she predicted Rose would come out of the ocean.

Amethyst found a comfortable rock, sat on it, and began to chew on some coconuts she’d found on the way. Once she gnawed through the outer shell, they got goey and wet -- it was fun! Garnet watched the ocean impassively, and Pearl tried not to shudder every time Amethyst broke open a coconut, but nothing was said between them.

Waify, pastel-palette Pearl stared into the sea, arms crossed, and uptight as always. Garnet stood in the wake, her red and black squareness defied the lapping blue waves to wash her away. Pint-sized purple Amethyst was the only source of noise.

Amethyst swallowed her latest coconut treat and slumped on her sitting rock. “So -- that big nasty Homeworld ship didn’t seem worth all the trouble we put into it. It didn’t even fight back.”

“It didn’t fight back,” Garnet said without turning around, “because we hit them right when their pilot took her hands off the controls. It was a matter of timing.”

“And precise use of energy,” Pearl preened.

Amethyst made a face and laughed. “Why would their pilot let go of the controls when they weren’t out of the atto-sphere yet.”

“_Atmosphere_,” Pearl corrected.

“Yeah, the atta-boy sphere!”

“[Mmmph](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EH7HuNDXkAETz14?format=png&name=small).”

Garnet adjusted her glasses and shrugged. “Don’t know. I found the future most advantageous for us, and acted on it. The reasons why aren’t important.” She touched her forehead, just above her glasses, and sighed. “But it will be. For her.”

“For who?” Pearl looked around, then snapped her head back at Garnet. “For Rose? Why would Rose care?”

“Ask her yourself, she’s on her way up now.”

Moments later the sea bubbled, and Rose Quartz burst into the air. A mass of bright pink curls, a layered dress with a star cutout around her gem, and taller than everyone Amethyst had seen, she floated gracefully to the shore once her jump reached its zenith.

Amethyst quickly jumped off the rock and loped on all fours toward Rose. “You’re back! What took you so long, did you fight a shark again?”

Rose’s eyes were focused on the ground as she walked onto the beach, her hands shook with emotion, and she said nothing at first. Pearl approached her, and offered a hand which Rose took automatically. “There were gems still on board when the ship went down. I had to bubble them and send them back to the temple.”

Rose’s voice was quiet, full of emotion that made Amethyst’s excited face melt away.

“How many did you save?” The leader turned to look at Pearl, then at Garnet when the waif had no answer.

Garnet crossed her arms and stoically met Rose’s. “Seven hundred and fifty-one.”

Rose nodded. “There were a lot of… a lot of bodies on the ship. Some humans were stuck in cages -- they couldn’t get out. I didn’t even notice they were there -- I was so focused on keeping Homeworld from even reporting news about Earth.”

Amethyst fell back onto her butt and looked downtrodden. She’d thought she’d saved a bunch of humans, but apparently seven hundred and fifty just wasn’t enough. It stunk, having her achievement mean less, but she imagined it stunk worse for the humans who’d lost someone.

She was surprised when Rose let go of Pearl’s hand to scoop Amethyst up into a hug.

“You noticed right away something was wrong,” their leader cooed. “And you helped everyone else realize it too. I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you.” Rose looked up, sorrowful, at the other members of the Crystal Gems. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to any of you.”

“At least they died on Earth,” Pearl offered, consolingly. “Their remains will help feed the cycle of life here. It’s better than whatever Homeworld wanted them for, I’m sure.”

Rose’s eyes hardened, and Amethyst felt a twinge of fear. “Speaking of whom. We have some trespassers to find, don’t we?” She set Amethyst down and looked to the north. “Their ship went down in the Tunguska Bay region, but I didn’t see which side. We’ll have to split up and look for them.” She turned, and arched a brow toward Garnet. “Unless….?”

Garnet adjusted her glasses, said nothing for a moment, and then shook her head. “One of them has a power which meddles with my future vision. It is like looking into a mirror that looks into another mirror, on and on into infinity. The only gems with anything like that are goshenites.”

Amethyst saw Pearl and Rose stiffen up instantly. “Wait,” she asked. “What’s a goshenite?”

“That doesn’t make sense, Garnet,” Pearl said, so afraid she had to mask it with anger quickly. “If there was a goshenite on that ship we wouldn’t have been able to do so much damage!”

Rose turned to Amethyst right as the purple gem began to repeat her question. “The highest gems on Homeworld are the diamonds. Below them are moissanites which rule their colonies when they’re away. And below them are the beryls, which are basically a diamond’s most trusted minions. Sapphires and normal beryls were seen in all the diamond’s courts. Each court has a special variety -- Pink Diamond had morganites, Yellow Diamond has emeralds, Blue Diamond has aquamarines, and….” Rose took a moment to breathe deep and calm herself down. “Goshenites are the fourth type.”

“I know it doesn’t make sense,” Garnet fired back, her stoicism replaced with affront and fear. “But I don’t know what else it could be! Nothing else can meddle with my future vision like this, not even another sapphire!”

Amethyst frowned, and looked up at the talller, more afraid gems. “Well,” she said, slow. “Rose quartzes didn’t exist until the diamonds came to Earth, right? Maybe they thought of a new gem for their next colony?”

Rose took a deep breath and looked away. “We have to hope that’s the case. If it _is_ a goshenite, then all we did as Obsidian is make her angry.”

\--

Eye-Five was afraid for the fifth time in her life. The first three times had been pretty simple -- afraid of her sister thinking herself better for being the ‘display model’, fear that she wouldn’t be choosened for anyone, and fear that her little one wouldn’t come out healthy. The fourth time was when the ship had signaled ‘incoming hostile’. And now the fifth was when she and 8XJ had to pilot the pod through the night toward the south.

Where they’d landed was extremely cold. The pod had been damaged on landing, and internal temperature regulation wasn’t on a first. Jay-Eight had produced blanket-sized sections of his gem weapon -- cloth, of all things -- to help them keep warm while Eye-Five fixed the damage.

They were extremely lucky that amethysts and agates had heat-related powers, or they would have frozen to death.

8XJ took her hands from the control bubbles and pulled at her mane-like hair. “Ugh! All this white stuff makes it impossible to tell where we’re going! I thought we were going south all this time, but -- no! East!”

Eye-Five looked up from the blanket nest that had been made for the fossils in the back row of seats, and climbed over to the front row. It was cold, terribly cold, but she warmed up when she got close to 8XJ. “How can you tell?”

The amethyst sighed and took up the control bubbles again to turn the pod slightly. “Look. See? The bay’s behind us. That means we’ve been heading east this whole time.”

Eye-Five squinted and her expression became melancholy as she processed what she saw. “That’s not the bay.”

The amethyst, clearly confused, responded appropriately. “Whatchootalkin’bout?”

“That’s the ocean. The bay didn’t have any ice in visual range.” Eye-Five met 8XJ’s eyes and tried to smile to make the news hurt less. “You had us going north, then suddenly turned south.”

8XJ looked at Eye-Five, then the ocean, and then buried her face in her hands. “Why couldn’t they include a simple magnetic tracker on these things? Something to tell you which direction ‘north’ is?”

Eye-Five looked over the edge of the seat to the fossils in the back. Jay-Eight was asleep, slumped onto the gembone. Bee-Four and Aych-Two were wide awake. Bee-Four looked like he wanted to find a hole and crawl inside never to come out. Aych-Two looked like… Eye-Five had seen that look before, she realized. It was on the face of some of the peridots during their experiment, when they thought ambers would replace them. Despondent, Eye-Five remembered the word from Peridot’s lessons on vocabulary. Aych-Two was despondent.

She sucked in a deep breath, and took control of the pod away from 8XJ. “Well, we’ll start going south now.” Resolute to get _some_ measure of hope back into the pod’s atmosphere, she nodded to herself. “At our current speed, it will only be a few weeks until we hit the equator, and then we won’t have to worry about temperature extremes.”

A squealing, squishing noise from the back rows distracted her for a moment. 8XJ slapped herself in the forehead and frowned. “Great. Now you lot are getting _hungry_.”

“What is… hungry?” Bee-Four asked, afraid.

“It’s when you go without eating too long,” Aych-Two explained. “If you stay hungry for long enough, you’ll die. So when you’re hungry, you need to eat something.”

“Oh… where does the fruit grow on Earth?”

“Probably in the tropics,” Eye-Five sighed. “The moisture in a fruit would freeze this far north.”

8XJ sighed, and took control from Eye-Five for a moment. She instructed the escape pod to levitate for a moment and sent out a pulse of green light which traversed the white landscape. “Of course there’s nothing big enough in range. That’d be too easy.” The amethyst looked at Eye-Five, serious, and jerked her head to the back row. “Get back there. Stay there. I’ll keep going and if I find something you guys can eat, I’ll go get it for you.”

Eye-Five nodded, and crawled back to the second row. Bee-Four held her close so his quartz heat could help her recover from the ambient chill in the pod outside their nest.

“We gotta hope that Holly-Blue sends a recovery team,” 8XJ muttered to herself, perhaps in a whisper she didn’t think the fossils could hear. “She’s gotta. We can’t be trapped here forever. We won’t make it….”

They continued southward until 8XJ found something on her ping-scans. The amethyst stopped the pod and turned around to look at the fossils.

“Alright,” she said, “there’s something out there with enough mass for you all to eat it. I’ll go get it, and bring it back.” She leaned across the seat’s back to get in their grills. “When I come back, I’m going to knock four times, one-two-three-four, and then I’ll stand in front of the pod’s window. Don’t open the pod for anyone, or anything else.”

Bee-Four nodded, and held his fellow fossils closer. Of the four of them, he was the biggest. Not the strongest -- opals out-did quartzes in that category -- but the most massive and thus he took it on himself to be their bodyguard.

8XJ nodded back, and opened the pod to leave. A sudden surge of clawing cold drove the fossils deeper into their nest, except for Jay-Eight who flopped forward onto the back of the driver’s seats.

Eye-Five watched the amethyst summon her weapon, a two-handed maul, and walk off into the endless white particles. Without much else to do, she went to sleep. She would wake for a few minutes, and glance over to see if anything changed. Usually, Bee-Four would have the bags under his eyes grow larger slightly, or Aych-Two would look ever so slightly more uncomfortable. Sometimes Jay-Eight would be awake, but usually not.

One time when she woke, it was to a sudden burst of cold. She saw Aych-Two’s legs mostly out of the pod while Bee-Four tried to pull him back in.

“I’ll be right back,” the jet said, exasperated. “I just need to pee!”

“We have no idea what could be out there!” Bee-Four responded as he tugged on the jet’s ankle. “Get back in here!”

“Fine, I’ll just go over the side of the pod, happy?!”

Eye-Five promptly bubbled her head to dull the noise, and went back to sleep. “Males,” she muttered, exasperated.

\--

If you're curious about what a goshenite is, or what they do. Here are [two ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPp-U4QonnM)helpful [vids ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R66hQJnyK98)that when combined should give you a general idea.


	13. Chapter 13

**Chapter Thirteen -- Oh No**

Jet was watched by Bee-Four rigorously when he got back in the pod. It wasn’t even that cold outside -- but Bee-Four was worried, so Jet finished his business and returned quickly. His spot in the nest of blankets had cooled somewhat, but it warmed up quickly as Bee-Four worked his magic.

Like rubies before them, quartz soldiers had power over fire and heat. A lot of organics on colonies had temperature restrictions, and being able to ignite flammable substances with proximity made them useful defoliators. And in situations like this, it kept them from freezing.

Absent anything else to do, Jet went to sleep.

He dreamed of a massive room of many platforms where pink chased couches were arrayed. Thorny, pink stone pillars made in the image of a strange woman with her arms outstretched to the other pillars. It borrowed elements of Blue Diamond’s palace, Jet realized as it took shape. Fossils of many types lounged about the room, preening themselves and each other. As Jet looked -- he saw they were other jets, for they all had the same blackened five-faceted gemstone.

He became aware of the ‘rules’ of the dream as he dreamed. These jets were unassigned. Great and mighty gems would come to their lounge and choose one to be a servant in their courts, and carry them away. They all wore the same uniform -- a top much like a quartz soldier with a pink diamond at its center, but their bottoms were a pair of shorts with a pink silk tulle addition to easily tell them apart. Jet’s customization was in the form of tasteful asymmetry, he had a tulle sash that hung off his hip and spiraled around his right leg to his ankle.

The doors to their lounge opened, and the jets all got into position to preen for their potential new mistress. The room shook with the footsteps of their new prospect and revealed herself to be a titanic figure all in blue. At first, Jet thought she might be a blue moissanite, until she pulled back her hood. Blue Diamond, _the_ Blue Diamond! Didn’t she have a jet already? Clearly not, or she wouldn’t have come.

Jet wanted to call out to her. But he knew that wouldn’t work. It wasn’t in the ‘rules’ of the dream, he would bend it too far too fast, and the dream would end. Even if she picked someone else, he could at least watch her for a little while longer.

Blue Diamond looked over the room, impassive. Her massive eyes shifted to each jet in turn, and then rested on Jet. She smiled, and stretched out her hand. One finger rested on his head and moved gently to and fro -- an attempt at petting despite their size difference. “I think this one will do, Pink,” Blue Diamond said to someone back toward the entrance to the jet den. “Send her in. Would you all please clear the lobby?” Blue glanced to the other jets who rose from their lounging positions and departed quickly.

“Wait, I don’t --” Jet spoke out, unsure of what the scene was about to become. 

Blue swept up her long cloak and vanished as if by magic. In her place was a much smaller, much pinker gem. The new gem was about as tall as an amethyst, and her wavy hair, skin, and eyes were all varying shades of pink. From her uniform, Jet guessed her to be a quartz soldier.

“Oh. Hello,” he offered. Suddenly alone in the den, he scooted back on his couch a bit to put some distance between them. “A-are you a cherry quartz?”

“No, but you’re close,” she responded in a voice that shook Jet to his core.

As she grew closer, Jet was overcome with a powerful sense of displacement, like he was being squished and stretched at the same time. Around him, the dream began to warp. Perfectly straight pillars became curved, the air distorted, like water rippling across it. Jet backed off of the couch and stood to keep backing up.

“Um, I don’t think I’d do very good as a quartz soldier’s jet,” he tried to diffuse the situation within the ‘rules’ of the dream. Smile, try to look pleasant, turn her down so she could call in a different jet.

“Unfortunately, neither of us have a choice.” Heedless of the distortion, the strange gem walked up to Jet. As she got closer, she looked eerily familiar to Jet, and he found himself unnaturally afraid.

“C-ould you please stay at least an arm’s length awa-yee!” Jet tried to back away some more, but the strange gem grabbed him and prevented him from fleeing any more.

“Hold still,” the strange gem said. She wasn’t mean about it, but she was quite firm. “I want to have a look at you, and you need to look at me.”

When Jet did look at her, the sense of displacement became so severe it felt like he was being warped too. When he looked at her, his mind told him he was looking in a mirror despite how clearly that was not the case. “I don’t understand.”

“I’ll lay it out for you then,” she said, still firm and without any meanness. “I’m the Rose Quartz they killed to make you.”

\--

8XJ hadn’t known what to expect from the earth animal when she found it. From the reports, most earth animals were pretty mild as far as fauna went. Only the really small things had anything approaching gem powers. Still, it was pretty surprising how it blended in with the snow so easily. It found her first, and ambushed her as she got near. Quadrupedal, physically large, with abundant muscle mass to make up for relatively blunt claws and dull teeth. The creature was pure white and aggressive.

Once it had 8XJ off her feet, it tried to pin her down and tear at her with its claws, but the amethyst was too tough for such tactics. She positioned her legs underneath it, and kicked the creature away.

“Hey, you had your turn. Now it’s mine!” The amethyst stood up and hefted her maul to meet the creature as it rushed her again. A bit of good old amethyst fire added some needed oomph to her swing, and set the creature flying ninety degrees relative to where it had charged from. “Alright, now -- hey!” The creature turned and ran when it got up, limping on one leg. “You’re supposed to stupidly keep fighting!”

The documents she’d read didn’t mention anything about being intelligent enough to flee from stronger foes! 8XJ wanted to vent some frustration by kicking around a stupid animal, now she had to chase it!

8XJ spun into a ball and rapidly caught up with the fleeing animal. Much as she wanted to use it for herself, she had to get its meats for the humans, so there was no more playing around. She caught up to the creature, then bounced herself into the air. When she was aloft, she uncurled and summoned her maul again. A flying overhead swing would surely take the creature out, and she could haul it back to the pod!

“Alright, this won’t hurt for long -- whoa!” The amethyst wound herself up for impact as she fell, but found something suddenly wrap around her leg and yank her off course. She landed in the snow, and skid a bit before friction caught up with her. “Hey, what gives?” When 8XJ stood up she saw something odd. A gem, purple-skinned and white-haired, but the size of a ruby. In her hand she had a whip with three tails at the end and lined with gem protrusions. “What the -- who are you?”

“I’m a Crystal Gem,” the newcomer said. Her hair covered one eye, while the other glared at 8XJ. “And you’re trespassing.” She hefted her whip and brought it down diagonally on 8XJ.

The whip was the weapon of the agate -- when 8XJ saw the telltale windup she froze as she envisioned Holly-Blue or her previous agates doing the same. But when the blow came it was weaker than she expected. That shock let her endure the attack with only being launched backward some more, and no actual damage. When she stood, she had her head in the game as it were. ‘This is not my commander,’ she told herself. ‘She has the whip, but that’s all.’

When the three tails of the whip came down again, 8XJ backed up to let it strike the snow. Then she stomped on the weapon so it couldn’t be wound up again. Her maul’s head was enveloped in fire as 8XJ wound up the weapon and slammed it dead-center onto the whip. A shockwave of snow and purple fire spread out from the impact site, melted the snow, and traveled up the whip. When it hit the small gem, a purple explosion sent the stranger flying.

Scorched and smoking, the small gem hit the snow and struggled to stand. 8XJ stomped her way over to her, the ground shook with each step. From her gem in her chest, the stranger pulled a new whip. But she struggled to move after 8XJ’s retaliation so much that the amethyst towered over her before she could swing again.

8XJ got a good look at the stranger’s gem, and frowned. “You’re an amethyst too,” she said and pointed to the gem in her shoulder. “We shouldn’t be fighting each other.”

“You’re right.” A new voice joined the conversation. 

8XJ didn’t have time to react as she suddenly felt something pass through her back and up her neck. It took her a moment to feel the two halves of her body start to part from each other due to gravity.

“You should’ve realized you were being led into a trap.”

8XJ felt her form start to disperse. Tears gathered in her eyes as she realized the humans wouldn’t even know what happened to her. They’d probably starve in the pod, or be forced to eat each other. The sheer enormity of her failure dawned on her as her body exploded into smoke, and left only her gem to fall into the snow.

\--

Pearl bubbled the amethyst’s gem, then dismissed her spear while she walked to Amethyst. “You okay? That was a big explosion.”

“M’ fine,” the diminutive quartz muttered while she got to her feet.

“Alright.” The waify figure looked up as fresh snow started to fall. “This is bad, we need to follow her tracks back to where she first landed, in case there’s more.”

“Any idea why she was fighting that bear?”

“No clue, unless Homeworld wants to get into the fur trade. Which….” Pearl pinched her chin in consideration. “That might actually be something they’d do. Huh. Something to bring up to Rose, when she gets back from healing it.”

“Did you see where Garnet went?” Amethyst looked around, shading her eyes to see better. “After we saw the bear, she bolted.”

“Well, she’s going to be easy to spot with her color scheme.” The waif looked down at Amethyst and grinned. “Have you ever flown in a snowstorm before?”

Amethyst frowned. “Yeah, it sucks. Especially when you have to fly against the wind.” The quartz started trudging through the snow. “And I’d probably get lost anyway.”

“Hmm, true.” Pearl admitted and followed after her. “Though you’re making progress in figuring out which direction is north!”

“Not like it’s hard, just gotta feel the magnetosphere with my gem….”

\--

A sudden shock woke the sleeping fossils up. The pod was suddenly ninety degrees where it should have been, and there was a crack in the viewing screen. Eye-Five quickly left the blanket nest and took control of the pod to try and right it. But before she could even synch up with the craft the vehicle was rocked by another blow.

Jay-Eight jumped a little as a sizable dent was put into the craft near his head. “What’s happening?” He demanded to know, and tried not to sound afraid. His little brother was next to him, he had to be the protector.

“We’re under attack,” Bee-Four responded with anger in his voice. “Come on, let’s get out there and fight!”

“8XJ told us to stay put,” Aych-Two cut in, demure. “She’ll be back soon….”

A second dent appeared in the pod, next to Aych-Two, which sealed Jay-Eight’s opinion on the matter. “Let’s go,” he told the gembone, and the two of them climbed to the top of the pod. Which currently was the bottom as the pod had flipped upside down. Jay-Eight, the stronger of the two, put his feet down into the snow and lifted the pod around him. The clearance gave Bee-Four room to leave as well, and gave them a clear view of their enemy.

She was red, her hair was rectangular, she had a visor covering her face, and elaborate gauntlets covering her hands. She seemed confused at first, but then she glanced at the fossil’s gems. “Of all the twisted, evil tactics,” she growled. “Shapeshifting to look like humans?!”

“Hey, if it works, it works,” Jay-Eight smirked to rile her up as he set down the pod. “They didn’t even know something was wrong until it was too late.”

The needling comment got her to charge him. Jay-Eight wrapped his arms in his gem-cloth and expanded it to match the width of her gauntlets. She punched into the improvised gauntlets and seemed shocked at how easily he blocked her. This set her up to easily get headbutted and thrown by Bee-Four with his horned helmet.

Bee-Four breathed heavily, steam rose from his skin and poured from his mouth. Around him, the snow began to melt, which Jay-Eight was immediately thankful for. The icy wind and snow had him shivering in a matter of seconds, but the heat Bee-Four emanated made it more tolerable.

The gembone led the charge against the gem, with Jay-Eight following in his footsteps. Their enemy had gotten up and easily caught Bee-Four’s helmet horns to totally arrest his movement. However, this took both her hands to do so. So Jay-Eight had his gauntlets unwrap and rewrap themselves into a long pole with sharpened points at the end. He lept over Bee-Four, ready to stab at the gem.

However, she was clever. She stopped resisting Bee-Four and let him push her back -- right into Jay-Eight’s weapon. Jay-Eight’s impromptu spear point was red when he pulled it back.

Bee-Four didn’t seem to mind that he’d been stabbed in the flank, and kept on pushing the gem until she managed to wrestle him away. That’s when she saw the bleeding wound, and paused. “Wha-what? That’s not… gems can’t….” She was so bewildered that she failed to notice a ball made from Jay-Eight’s gem-cloth en route until it struck her in the head.

“Bee,” Jay-Eight said as he stood between her and the gembone, “get to the pod, and get healed, quickly.”

“I can still fight,” the agate growled, and steam practically poured off him as he spoke. Particularly from his wound.

“Not for long with a wound like that.” Jay-Eight screwed up, at that moment. He took his eyes off the enemy to meet Bee-Four’s. “Look, I’m sorry, I missed. Just get healed and come back. I can -- “

It was Jay-Eight’s turn to be surprised by a projectile. The gem had launched one of her gauntlets at him like a missile, and clocked him right in the face. While he went flying, Bee-Four charged and went in to gore the gem.

A sudden pain in his abdomen made him stop. When he looked down, he saw a shaft of energy had impaled him in the gut. The pain extended from front to back, and when he felt behind him, he found the weapon had gone through him.

It was hard to breathe, with an openly bleeding wound and being impaled. He struggled to take a step toward the red gem, who looked shocked, and found himself struck again by another energy shaft in his chest. Soon enough the attacker revealed herself. A giant woman, with four arms and two visible gemstones, armed with a bow. She quickly went to the red gem’s side, and looked in horror at what she had done.

As Bee-Four hit the ground, Jay-Eight got up just in time to see the other fossil surrounded by blood. Bee-Four still breathed, but for how much longer he didn’t know.

“We surrender!” Jay-Eight dispelled his weapon and held his hands up. “We give up -- just let our healer fix him up before he dies!”

Did Bee-Four even know he was dying? Jay-Eight glanced over at the pod, and saw it was still upside-down. Eye-Five couldn’t get out like that.

The giant woman looked in confusion at Jay-Eight, then to Bee-Four, and at the red gem. “They’re… humans?” She asked before her body began to contort and shift into light. A moment later, two different gems, two much smaller gems, stood in her place.

“Oh my stars, we were fighting humans!” A waify figure said, shrill, and pulled at her peach-colored hair. “We have to get Rose over here quickly!”

“Humans with gems,” the red one said, astounded. “Human gem hybrids?”

The smallest of them just stared in horror at Bee-Four, who lay face down in the snow.

With no resistance, Jay-Eight backed up to the pod and tipped it over with ease. Eye-Five crawled out of the hole and made a mad dash for Bee-Four.

“Garnet, Amethyst, Pearl, what’s going on he -- “

_Another_ strange gem had shown up, this one substantially pinker and larger than the rest. She stared in horror at what she saw, but her eyes locked onto Eye-Five as the amber gathered her healing resin and applied it to Bee-Four’s wounds.

“This situation rapidly spiraled out of control,” the red gem, Garnet, explained to the others. “Heated words were exchanged, Opal got involved, and it all happened just a bit too fast for me.”

Jay-Eight leaned in close to Eye-Five and whispered. “Why didn’t you flip the pod?”

“Main power’s out,” she hissed back. “I’ll need time to fix it.”

“We can hear you, you know,” the smallest of the four new gems whispered, as she was on Eye-Five’s other side. Both the fossils jumped at her sudden presence, but Eye-Five quickly got to work. “So, you’re a healing gem?”

“Well… sort of,” Eye-Five admitted. “Heal and repairs, actually.”

She looked at Jay-Eight next, curious. “And what kind of gem are you?”

Jay-Eight, less panicked with Bee-Four out of the danger-zone, smiled disarmingly. “Oh, I’m a gladiator.”

The other three seemed to realize at once that something was wrong. But the little purple gem wasn’t in on the joke. “Oh? What’s your name?”

“Ammonite,” Jay-Eight cat-smiled at her. “But your friends would probably know me better as Opal.”

“Amethyst, get away from him,” the big and pink gem demanded.

But Jay-Eight was quicker. He leaned across Bee-Four to look Amethyst in the eyes. “_Aren’t you tired of being bossed around?_” He asked her with a haunting voice that echoed softly. “_Doesn’t it just make you furious when they tell you what to do?_”

Amethyst’s visible eye glazed over, and her facial expression turned furious. She whirled on her former allies, and produced her gem weapon with both hands. A whip! How surprising for a quartz!

While the strange gems dealt with their hostile friend, Jay-Eight grabbed both his fellow fossils and bolted for the pod. “Main power’s down, what about reserve?”

Eye-Five, dragged like she was light as a feather, answered: “Mostly good, just flip us over first.”

His passengers were tossed into the pod, and Jay-Eight righted the thing while its occupants tumbled. He stood outside and waited for the vehicle to come online, while the gems fought amongst themselves. “Any day now, Eye-Five,” he muttered as the amethyst was poofed by the big pink gem.

The pod shuddered to life and floated out of Jay-Eight’s grip. The cold made him eager to get inside, so he jumped up through the hole, and immediately sealed the pod up.

“Hold on,” Eye-Five announced as she bade the pod to float away at top speed. “I’m really hoping this thing moves faster than they can.”

Jay-Eight righted his unconscious fellow display model, and quickly wrapped him in a blanket he made from his weapon. “Brother, are you okay?” Jay-Eight brushed some of the gembone’s dreads out of his face, and frowned when he got no response. “Brother?” When he turned, he saw a noticeable vacancy where Aych-Two should have been in the pod.

\--

Jet floated through the air, warm in his bubble, and tried to ignore the grumbling of his stomach. “They’ll be better off without me,” he told himself. “I’m bad. Blue Diamond said so. I don’t have a purpose. Blue Diamond said so. I’d just get them hurt.”

The more he told himself, the easier it was to believe.


	14. Chapter 14

**Chapter Fourteen: Haunted**

\---

Eye-Five knew that their escape from those gems was temporary at best. The fossils were hungry, gems knew no hunger. The pod needed repairs or reserve power would run out, gems knew no tiredness.

She glanced over her shoulder to look at the men in the back row. Jay-Eight was almost catatonic, he’d been still and hollow looking since they found out Aych-Two had left the pod. Bee-Four had his head resting on his knees with his arms wrapped around his legs, no doubt blaming himself for their loss and for Aych-Two’s misplacement.

The situation was bad, to put it lightly. If 8XJ had returned, then she could fly the pod while Eye-Five restored main power. But neither of the other fossils were proficient enough to pilot a damaged craft, especially when they were being pursued.

“Guys,” she said and winced as her stomach painfully growled, “we _need_ a plan. We’re on our own now, no gems to tell us what to do. So, what do we do?”

“We could always give up,” Jay-Eight listlessly offered.

“After you used our previous surrender as a smokescreen to hypnotize that gem? You really think they’d accept that?”

Jay-Eight shrugged.

Frustrated, Eye-Five clenched her jaw and made an inarticulate noise of rage. “Bee-Four, any ideas?”

“We’re outmatched,” the gembone muttered into his knees, “outnumbered and have too few resources to survive on our own in this cold environment. Logically, surrender is the best option right now.” The gembone looked up and revealed he’d been crying into his knees the whole time, tears streaked down his face. “But because of Jay-Eight, they might just try to shatter us if they catch us.”

“I’m a gladiator, not a soldier,” Jay-Eight muttered, almost miffed enough to escape his stupor. “Never said I was good at tactics.”

“You’ve never even been in an arena!” Eye-Five snapped. “So you’re not a gladiator!”

“Feh,” the ammonite rolled into the corner and put his back to both other fossils. After a few minutes, he turned back slightly to the others. “I remember from the maps that there was a gem spire to the west of where we landed. The previous batch of humans said they lived close to a gem structure. Think there’s other humans at that spire?”

Eye-Five sighed and double-checked that they were heading in a generally westward direction. “Better than just giving up, I guess.”

\--

Jet drifted on the winds in his bubble. Below him, the snow-covered shore had been replaced with choppy black water. He was being blown north, though he didn’t know that at the time. In his bubble, he was warm, safe, and alone. Plenty of time to think, and feel sorry for himself.

The fossil curled up in a ball when the thoughts became too much, and he would dream for a bit. Sometimes, he would dream about Blue Diamond and he could remember what it was like to be happy. Other times, he would play back _her_ memories. Rose Quartz 2XN’s memories. The memory which played back the most was when all the rose quartzes had been gathered up by Pink, and she destabilized them for bubbling -- Pink had made them line up for it.

Eventually, Jet saw something in the clouds above during his travels. A building, partially collapsed, which floated high above the ground. It looked like a cone pointed downward -- a gladiatorial arena, he realized. Blue Diamond had planned a number of them for her colony.

Jet stopped his bubble’s aimless floating and directed it to drift up toward the arena. As he got closer he could see signs of fighting outnumbered those of erosion. Scorch marks, impact cracks and craters, smooth cut lines. Things of that nature. A full two-thirds of the original structure had to have been lost if he guessed right.

The inner rooms and hallways were exposed due to the damage, so Jet just floated in and dropped his bubble. Immediately, he regretted the decision as he was beset by frigid stone under his feet, and icy wind at his back. He quickly ran down the hall and around the corner to get out of the wind, then began to explore the insides of the arena.

In his search, he found a route up to the proper arena, and to some ancient cubby holes for the original gladiator’s use. It seemed that the forge which should have been built in for making arms and armor had been part of the building that had been lost. Because of course it was.

In the gladiator’s abandoned barracks, Jet bubbled himself again to escape the cold. Just for a little while, he told himself. So he could stop shivering and look around for something useful.

Imagine his surprise when he faintly heard a chime-like sound. He couldn’t mistake it -- that was the sound of a warp pad activating, nothing else sounded quite like it. A gem was nearby.

Jet rubbed his arms to help get them warmed up. He was going to need to bolt for the exposed tunnels and bubble his way out of the situation. For a moment, he considered just rolling his bubble down the hall, but Jet was doubtful it could make the corners with its size. That made him think -- what if he could make it smaller? Or only bubble parts of his body to keep them warm? Jet burst the bubble, and then reached down to his feet, two bubbles sprung up around them, and provided instant relief from the cold stone.

Better than nothing, he thought as he entered the partial maze of hallways. He just needed to get to an exposed hallway, and jump. He could float away, and the gem would have no ability to stop him.

“So, whatcha running from?” A feminine, energetic voice asked him as he ran.

“A gem who just teleported in here,” he answered right away and tightly turned a corner.

“Why are you running from them?”

“Cause I don’t know who they are, and they attacked me and my friends before.”

“So you think they’ll attack you too?”

“Probably? Yeah, they will.” Jet took a moment to realize what had just transpired, and looked down. At his side was a ruby-sized purple amethyst with short white hair and black and grey clothes. Her short hair covered one eye, but her other eye was alight with mischief. “Oh.”

Jet tried to run faster and lept the first time he saw the grey skies outside. Unfortunately he was way too hasty, and discovered that the gap he had tried to escape out of was not wide enough. His arms and torso got through, but his hindquarters were a bit too generous to make the journey. He was stuck.

His attempts to pull himself free failed. He tried to find footing to push from the other side, but he was at an awkward angle where he could only brush the wall. When he tried to bubble himself to break free, his bubble popped instantly. And to make matters worse, the amethyst found it hilarious.

She stuck her head out through another hole further down the hallway to talk to him. “Hehehe, why don’t you just shapeshift your way out, huh?”

Jet scrabbled again to try and pull himself free, then hung limply when he failed. “I don’t know how to shapeshift.”

“Pfft, what?” The amethyst’s body became light, and she morphed into a tiny purple gecko with her gem on her underbelly. “Shapeshifting’s as easy as breathing, silly.” She crawled along the exterior of the hallway to get closer to Jet and stuck her tongue out at him.

“Maybe to you, but I never finished my training on gem powers.”

The quartz jumped off the wall to land on Jet and quickly vanished into his poofy hair. Jet, weirded out by this, tried to find her and grab her but she was too quick. “You look like that Opal jerk who hypnotized me, but your gems aren’t the same. What gives?”

“Ah, the human parts of us are related, but we’re different types of fossils!”

“Wha? The heck’s a ‘fossil’?” Suddenly the amethyst became her ruby-sized self again and sat down on Jet’s back.

“We are! Gem-human hybrids! Now can you get off?” Jet tried to turn and push her off him but to no avail.

“I could,” the amethyst sing-songed. “But I got more questions. Like, what are these?” The little gem pulled on one of Jet’s earrings, and marvelled at how they weren’t connected visibly. “Is it held on with these things?”

“Ow! Stop pulling on -- ow!” Jet jerked as Amethyst pulled the two anchoring beads which held his earing up apart. “Give that back!”

“Why? They important to ya or something?”

The Little Voice had been quiet since they’d left the zoo, but being without one of his earrings made Jet panic. “Yes, please! I’ve had them my whole life!”

“Well, Imma be honest, you’d look better without them.” Amethyst shrugged and let Jet grab his earring back, to snap it back onto his ear. “Anyway, next question!” Suddenly she was all excited again. “What are you doing on Earth, anyway?”

“Gah,” Jet rubbed his ear, sore from the removal and reapplication of the earring. “I was supposed to be banished, the others are just trapped here.”

Amethyst frowned. “Banished? Is that why you’re alone?”

“No. I left them, cause I’d just drag them down.” Jet sagged, still stuck. “Every gem’s got a special role just for them, but when they tried to find one for me….” He started to laugh at the absurdity of being so honest with someone who had fought his brother not too long ago. “They couldn’t find anything for me to do! I’m worthless to them!”

Amethyst didn’t say anything, so Jet looked back to see if she was disgusted with him, or if she pitied him. What he saw in her face put an end to his manic laughter. Not pity, or disgust. He saw understanding in her expression.

\--

Holly-Blue didn’t often visit the nursery for the infant fossils. They needed to be cared for, and the automated systems and Pearl could do that easily enough -- the time had long passed that Holly-Blue needed to do everything herself. But she did so again, to escape the endless shouting matches, the threats from Sagenite Agate, and the constant criticism of her every decision.

“Since your father was lost,” she told the infant Jay-Eight had recently helped deliver, “things haven’t been going all that great lately.” She smiled for the ruddy-skinned human, even though she didn’t feel like smiling. It was important that when the infants smiled at someone, they were smiled back to in turn. It helped their social development later in life. “All of you represent a tremendous investment, you know.” She picked up the baby and robotically carried it to the changing station. The infant ammonite was a girl, she found when she changed the little one’s swaddling cloth. “So much time and effort put into making sure you develop correctly, that you socialize correctly, that you have the correct temperment….”

Frazzled, and near exhausted, Holly-Blue picked up the babe when she was changed and flounced into a nearby rocking chair. “And it can all go wrong even when everything is done exactly to standard.” The babe was more preoccupied with trying to eat her foot than Holly-Blue, so the agate let her fake smile fade away. “Two display models gone, one of our best ambers, and Aych-Two. All those years of planning, all that effort…. Wasted.”

Oh and the amethysts and jaspers assigned to them, those were lost. And the ship too, that was gone. Holly-Blue rolled her eyes automatically. “Sagenite Agate is the one who insisted we use the Hand, and she ought to know that it risked being lost. Things _happen_ in the field.” Holly-Blue sighed and smiled down at the babe. “You’ll see so yourself when you’re old enough to capture some humans.”

This seemed to please the infant, who spread her hands wide and smiled toothlessly.

“I’m sure you’ll do your father proud and bring whole cities to us for processing.” Holly-Blue tickled the infant fossil’s nose. In the nursery, talking with the young, she could put aside the put-upon figure that she had to be outside in the facility. It was appropriate for a commander to face a period of near abuse after a failed mission, to teach them to be better next time. For Holly-Blue it didn’t have that effect.

** “Attention, Right Arm of Authority inbound.”**

“Oh great,” Holly-Blue rolled her eyes and stood up from the chair. The announcement was going to get her troops scrabbling for their orders. She quickly set the infant back in her crib and waved goodbye. “Holly-Blue will see you next time,” she said. As soon as the baby was no longer looking at her, she let the smile drop and all but dragged herself out of the nursery.

\--

Amethyst had acted odd for the days after the human-gem hybrids escaped, Pearl noted. She originally thought she’d had a bad reaction to the injuries Opal had inflicted. Pearl would have understood that. She remembered when she had first attacked a human and found out, brutally, that humans and gems didn’t have the same bodily structure.

They were so full of _fluids_, and wriggling organs. Ugh. At least that human had deserved it.

But no, when Pearl looked into it, she found Amethyst had been digging through the contents of her landfill room and ferrying things away through the warp pad. It didn’t take long for Pearl to notice a trend. Fabrics, containers, pieces of furniture, and fire salt? Obvious in hindsight. Pearl opted to confront her about it when it happened next.

That happened to be when Amethyst tried to smuggle a bearskin rug out of her room. Pearl had stood outside the cave where the temple door and teleporter lay to wait, and made her way over quickly.

“Hello, Amethyst,” she said, coy. She half-lidded her eyes when she saw how the little quartz jumped, and looked like she’d been caught. “Something the matter? You’ve been off on your own little adventure the past couple of days.”

“I just… I’m just tidying up!” Amethyst hid the rolled-up fur rug behind her even though it was twice her height. “You know. Cleaning out some of the junk?”

Pearl’s eyebrow arched gracefully over the course of Amethyst’s lie. “That’s the best you can come up with?” The renegade servant crossed her arms. “I expected a better lie, something clever. Something inventive to cover up this irresponsible behavior.”

Amethyst flinched and looked away.

“Really -- it’s obvious to anyone who pays even a little bit of attention.”

The chastised gem brought the bear-skin rug around to hold horizontally, defeated.

“I mean -- a pet? Really?”

“Huh-wha -- I mean, um, yeah.” Amethyst rubbed the back of her neck and tried to laugh the discovery of her plot off. “A pet! That’s… really obvious in hindsight, huh?”

Pearl’s response was clipped: “Amethyst this isn’t a joking matter. It’s fine to have an organic pet, but you can’t just leave it in the -- I’m going to go on a limb and guess -- polar regions.” The pastel gem paced in front of Amethyst, and began to list off all the dangerous gem monsters and natural wildlife in the polar regions, and every single horrible thing that could happen to something which expected a gem to protect it.

“You know -- you make such a good point.” Amethyst stuck her hand out with her thumb up. “Imma go move my pet to a better spot. Okay? Okay. Thanks for the advice.”

“Now hold _on_.” Pearl stepped onto the warp pad before Amethyst could warp away. “I’m coming with you. This isn’t going to be a repeat of the shark incident where you feed an _obligate carnivore_ nothing but fruit and wonder why it begins to starve. What have you been feeding it?”

Amethyst shifted on her feet, and began to glance over her shoulder at the temple door. No doubt afraid Rose or Garnet would catch them in such a talk. “Strawberries? From the strawberry battlefield?”

Pearl’s expression and voice were so flat the plains of Kansas would be envious. “And are they at _least_ am omnivore?”

“... I dunno what that is.”

“Oh for the love of -- “ Pearl pinched the bridge of her bird-like nose. “Look, just take me there. I’ll give your pet a once-over, and make sure this isn’t going to end with you bringing _another_ corpse into the temple. I won’t tell Rose or Garnet, assuming you’ve been responsible, and the pet is alive when we get there.”

“He’s not dead yet!” Amethyst retorted, then slapped her hand over her mouth.

“Ah, so you can actually tell the gender for this one, good. This means it’s likely a mammal. Come on.”

Amethyst tried to cajole and negotiate, but the threat of the other Crystal Gems wandering in at any moment made Pearl’s bargaining position unassailable. They warped away, and when the warp stream resolved Pearl saw they were at the ancient sky arena’s ruins. Immediately, her smug grin turned into a frown.

“Amethyst, did you bring an animal to this place? It could fall to its death, you know!”

“Yeah, I know, I’m not very good at this, hey I need to go tidy up so you can’t yell at me for making a mess -- seeya in a bit!” Amethyst hastily chatted with Pearl and backed off the pad before she straight-up bolted into the arena.

Pearl sighed and followed after her at a more relaxed pace. Amethyst at least was motivated to clean, that wouldn’t happen for another thousand years -- Pearl wasn’t going to fight against it. To her surprise, she didn’t find the animal loose in the arena proper, but the snow on the stone indicated Amethyst had gone into the undercroft. There weren’t a whole lot of rooms down there since the structure collapsed, so Pearl guessed Amethyst had made a room in the gladiator’s quarters.

As soon as she got into the tunnels, she was alarmed by the sound of tearing fabric. Perhaps Amethyst’s pet was of the destructive persuasion. That made Pearl think it was a dog, before she corrected herself. The pet was a ‘he’, so ‘he’ was likely a dog.

“...ow! My ears...”

Pearl stopped dead in her tracks when she heard a distinctly not-Amethyst voice.

“Look, it’s just for a while, then you can go back to how you were!” _That_ was Amethyst’s voice.

Dread crept into Pearl like a disease would a human, and despite the horrifying images she imagined to explain the new images, she resumed walking. The gladiator’s quarters were just around the corner, blocked off by heavy fabric hung from the ceiling -- heavy fabric Amethyst had smuggled out of the temple. From the other side, she saw two shadows -- one was Amethyst, but the other was much too large.

Dread and fear made Pearl feel far away as she walked toward the impromptu curtain and pulled it aside.

For a moment, Pearl, Amethyst, and the new figure just looked at each other. The larger figure was a human -- male, a Mediterranean skin tone, poofy black hair, he almost looked like the opal human-gem hybrid they had fought. But he was shorter, his hair was in the wrong direction, and he had no gemstone in his chest. In fact, he had nothing on his chest or below. The human was in the nude, and covering himself in the bearskin rug Amethyst had brought with her.

Pearl faintly noted Amethyst pushing aside a blue and white pile of rags with her foot while she tried to smile at Pearl. “Um,” Amethyst started, but was cut off by Pearl.

“Oh,” she said and made it clear how displeased she was via her voice. “He’s ‘that’ kind of pet. It all makes sense now.”

The human frowned and glanced at Amethyst. “Pet?” He seemed unsure about the question. Perhaps Amethyst hadn’t been honest.

“Um,” Amethyst answered, sweating bullets.

“I won’t tell Garnet or Rose if you don’t want them to know,” Pearl said and backed out of the repurposed gladiator’s quarters. “Just… don’t get too attached. Humans rarely live past thirty these days.”

Pearl left, paused when she had gotten around the corner, and shuddered. She needed to tell Rose to be less open with her human amusements if Amethyst was copying her. Eugh, the mental images would haunt her for years.


	15. Chapter 15

** Chapter Fifteen: Uncomfortable Situation**

Jet sat in the improvised room Amethyst had set up for him. An uncorked bottle of fire salt helped keep the room warm, and curtains at the door kept that warmth from escaping. Some rugs on the floor kept him insulated from the cold stone in certain areas, the bear fur rug was meant to add to that floor coverage. Until Pearl showed up, and necessitated changes to keep the help she provided to a ‘homeworld gem’ secret.

Jet’s previous outfit had been rendered unwearable due to how quickly Amethyst needed it, and the prominent diamond logo, out of sight. Afterward, Jet had asked her why Amethyst had to wreck his loincloth as well, with the answer being she had ‘panicked’. At least he still had his earrings.

If he’d learned how to weave light to make new objects as Blue Diamond and her Pearl could do, it wouldn’t have been an issue. But it was, so Amethyst quickly left to find a fix for the situation.

With nothing else to do, Jet reflected. With no one else to talk to, he talked to himself. “It can’t keep going on like this,” he told himself and rubbed his hands together to warm up his fingers. “Sitting back, letting other people make decisions for me.”

“That’s what Holly-Blue wanted, though,” he advocated against himself. “It’s what Blue Diamond wanted.”

“Well, they’re not here.” Jet adjusted the bear fur rug so it was like a blanket, while he laid down. “But I am. I have to do _something_ \-- or it’ll get boring real quick. Maybe I can find… a new diamond?”

The sound of the warp pad’s distant activation put a stop to Jet’s conversation with himself. Soon thereafter, Amethyst bowled through the curtain and dumped a pile of clothes three times her size on the floor.

“Okay!” She said, exasperated. “I figured out a quick, easy way to take care of all this.” She gestured to the pile of clothes. “I found these in an abandoned village east of the sky spire. Took some flying, but I got them here for you.” The purple gem sighed and slumped to the ground. “There’s a whole buncha stuff in that village, going to take some to the temple, and bring furniture and stuff here.”

“Oh,” Jet said and looked at the pile of clothes. “Won’t they be mad that you stole their stuff?”

“Uh, no?” Amethyst rolled onto her back and kicked her feet up in the air. “It’s an _abandoned_ village. They left.”

“But won’t their diamond be mad at them for having to replace all this?”

“No, because there’s no diamond on Earth, duh.”

The idea flabbergasted Jet. He sat up and rubbed his head while he tried to parse the idea. “But, then who tells them what to do?”

“Iunno,” Amethyst shrugged, then rolled into the pile of clothes. “Come on, try some of this stuff on!” She stuck her head out of the pile and eyed Jet. “Hmm, bet you’ll want mostly blue stuff?”

“Well, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of black.”

Amethyst’s head vanished into the pile, and re-emerged with a black garment in hand. “Found something!” She examined it and tossed it down to Jet. “A bit glossier than your gem, but it’s black. Oh, wait, almost forgot the fun part!” She vanished back into the pile and crawled out with a long, narrow strip of white cloth in hand. “The weird thing with this type of human is they wear this stuff under all their clothes -- here let me show ya how it’s done.”

After much confusion, much laughter by Amethyst, and many pained yelps from Jet, he had the uncomfortable distinction to be the first fossil to wear a ‘fundoshi’ as Amethyst called it. From there it was pretty simple to try on most of the clothes provided by Amethyst -- a lot of them were just ‘put arms in, fold over, tie a knot in the belt’. Amethyst’s prediction came true, most of the stuff Jet liked the most were mostly blue and black.

“Alright, now this is going to be _super weird_,” Amethyst informed Jet with clear glee.

The fossil half-lidded his eyes and responded, flat: “I cannot imagine how it can top that unnecessarily complex loincloth.”

The quartz giggled and dove back into the pile. When she emerged, she had two carved blocks of some organic material. They had string threaded into them which made two arches spread out from a single point. “These are called sandals,” she explained. “Specifically ‘get’ something. I don’t remember. And these,” she added as she set the ‘sandals’ down to dig around in the pile some more, “are socks!” Her next reveal was of two tube-like white cloths that were sectioned off on one side. “They go on your feet.”

Jet blinked, once, twice, and a third time before he sighed and stretched his legs out. “What is _wrong_ with humans?”

“Dunno, but Pearl has a list I think.”

\--

The glacial spire was indeed west of where the fossils had landed. None of them knew what it had been called, but it was partially buried as what looked to be a river of ice took shape around it. Eye-Five said that the ice river was called a ‘glacier’, so it became the glacial spire.

All around the spire were smaller pillars which had once formed a ring. They had been knocked down or frozen over by the glacier as time went on, it seemed, as most were not in their places. There were no humans around the base of the spire, but the door was clearly visible. Bee-Four hoped that there was something they could use inside, and climbed out of the pod to use his heat to melt through the ice over the hand-shaped command panel.

Inside, it was dark. There were no windows to the outside, the little light they had to work with was made by the pod. Once the pod was inside, and Bee-Four had closed the door behind them, Eye-Five emerged to start repairs. Bee-Four waited for Jay-Eight to also emerge from the pod, but the ammonite didn’t.

The gembone climbed up to the pod and looked down the hatch at the interior. “What’s wrong?”

Jay-Eight had sprawled out on the back seat of the pod, rolled over, and glared up at Bee-Four like he’d asked a stupid question. “Aych-Two is gone,” he muttered.

“We’ll find him. Once the pod is fixed, we’ll have more freedom to go looking for him.”

“Assuming he’s not dead yet,” Jay-Eight’s tone shifted down into a growl. “Assuming those gems we fought didn’t catch him first.”

Bee-Four sat back and thought about how difficult it would be to find one person in all that snow they had left behind. And he started to wonder how long Aych-Two would last out there in the cold, on an unknown world. If the reactions Eye-Five and Jay-Eight had to the cold were any indicators, it wasn’t long.

“...You had to know this would happen one way or another,” Eye-Five said, while she worked on the pod with her resin. “The point of bringing him was so that he could be left behind when our mission was done.”

Bee-Four’s eyebrows shot up. He glanced down at Jay-Eight and saw the ammonite roll away from Eye-Five with his hands behind his head.

“If the mission had gone ahead as normal, he’d be just as gone as he is now.” She stood up to look at Jay-Eight through the pod’s cracked screen. “Weren’t you getting ready to let him go? Isn’t that why you came?” Bee-Four hadn’t seen someone look so sad and so confused at the same time before he saw Eye-Five’s expression toward Jay-Eight’s back.

Jay-Eight rocked back and forth on his sides before he sighed. “I thought… I would be able to say goodbye. And the mission failed, so I thought… I thought….”

Eye-Five sighed and went back to work. Bee-Four decided to leave Jay-Eight alone, and went to explore the spire. His gem produced a multi-colored stream of light for him to see by, and his footsteps seemed to warm the stone as he wandered. The ground floor was open, with only pillars to support it, and murals of the diamonds on the walls. Each diamond was flanked by mosaic depictions of some event in their history which Bee-Four lacked the knowledge to understand.

He found the stairs to the next level worked into the centermost pillar, with alcoves along the walls of the stairway in which decorative pots were placed. On the next level up, he found furniture and statues in disrepair. There was a terrible quiet to the whole structure -- no noise whatsoever except for the slaps of Bee-Four’s feet.

So it went until he worked his way up to the upper levels of the spire, where he found something useful, at last. A massive structure that looked like a heart made of iridescent pink crystal. The ventricles were, cracked, broken. The connective tubes between them and the walls of the spire were no longer intact, with pieces all over the ground.

Bee-Four rushed down to relay the news to Eye-Five, with the possibility that she might even know what it did. And when he came down to the base level, he was shocked to see the door open. When he looked around, his gem light caught sight of the reasons why. The red and pink gems had found them. Jay-Eight and Eye-Five were encased in bubbles held by the red gem who vanished them with no visible effort.

“You’ve nowhere left to run,” the pink gem told him with grim determination. She manifested a shield with a spiral pattern from her navel gem and brandished it at him. “Surrender, and we’ll let you see your friends again.”

Bee-Four grit his teeth and summoned his helmet instinctually. He and the two gems glared at each other while they waited for someone to make the first move. Bee-Four got so mad smoke began to rise from his ears, but soon they sputtered out as he clenched his hands as hard as he could. “Even if I fought you and won, I’d just end up starving to death out here.” He dismissed his helmet and tugged on his dreadlocks while tears of rage sprung from his eyes. “I can’t keep them safe unless I lose. I don’t have any choice.”

“You have many choices,” the red gem quipped. “But only one of them gets you out of this mess.”

While the gembone grit his teeth and fumed at the fresh failure he’d been subjected to, the pink gem calmly approached him. “Would you rather be angry at me for giving you no choice at all, or angry with yourself for making one?”

Bee-Four was stunned by her question, it knocked him out of his feedback loop of boiling, impotent rage. “I… don’t know.”

“Hmm,” the pink gem said and nodded. “Let’s err on the side of no choice at all, since that’s where your mind went in the first place. This will sting.”

“Wha -- “ Before Bee-Four could react to the pink gem’s bizarre mannerisms, she slammed her shield into his face and knocked him out cold.

\--

In the fortress of the Crystal Gems, their temple, there was a room. At its center was a pool of lava, and circular steps went up away from the pool to the walls. Above the pool hundreds of bubbled gems floated in suspension. Behind those bubbles, vessels for the temple’s power source pierced the upper walls and roof. Into this room stepped Rose Quartz.

With the gem-human hybrids recovered, Rose could give them a look-over. Well cared for, except for the recent abuses. There were no signs of long-term abuse, even the soles of their feet weren’t calloused. The woman with the bubbly golden gemstone had signs of recently having given birth, but there was no baby with them.

While they were bubbled and unconscious, Rose examined their gemstones. They were totally unique looking, she hadn’t seen anything like them before. The opal variant, ammonite, was interesting because of the spiral shape toe the stone, while the seemingly fractured nature of the dreadlocked one, and the pockets of air trapped inside the woman’s gem all painted a fascinating picture of their formation.

She couldn’t unbubble them, the opal alone would pose too great a threat. And if the healling/repair gem got free she might just repair the galaxy warp.

While she waited in the burning room in the temple for the other Crystal Gems to gather, Rose pondered how the hybrids had been made. Were White’s goshenites involved? Could their reality-warping powers even distort things _that_ much? And if so, why?

What could the diamonds hope to gain from creating hybrids?

Rose heard a scuffle from somewhere above and knew Pearl and Amethyst were on their way.

“...you can hang out with your new pet _after_ the team meeting,” Pearl said, exasperated as she hauled Amethyst into the burning room. The sight of hundreds of bubbled gems always creeped the little quartz out, Rose understood why she didn’t want to be there.

“Can’t you just give me the cliff notes version?” Amethyst groused, and tried to wriggle free of Pearl’s grip.

“Amethyst,” Rose said, gentle but firm. “It’s important that you be here for this, you might notice something we all miss. Like you did when we attacked the ship.”

Amethyst gave Pearl no trouble after that. They just had to wait for Garnet to return, which she did not too much later.

“Alright,” the fusion said while she crossed the threshold into the burning room. “I put the pod in a volcano, so that should melt it down.” She clapped her hands together to brush off residual volcanic ash. “Hopefully.”

Rose looked up at the three bubbled human-gem hybrids and sighed. “This isn’t going to be easy, dealing with them. Because they’re not fully gems, we can’t just leave them in their bubbles.” She eyed the ‘ammonite’ and the healing gem. “And we can’t just leave them free to wander the planet -- so what do you think we should do?”

“Well, we could try extracting the gems from them,” Pearl slowly offered after a lengthy silence. “But we don’t know how much of their bodies have become dependent on the gems being there….”

Garnet adjusted her glasses then suddenly shuddered. “Bad idea,” she said as she crossed her arms. “Literally every future where we try that ends with something awful.” She frowned and looked over to Amethyst. “And there’s one future where if we try that Amethyst permanently becomes a lobster.”

“Ooh, what kinda lobster?” Amethyst giddly asked. “A… rock lobster?” She shapeshifted down into the shape of the delicious crustacean. “A cape lobster? Caribbean lobster? C’mon, tell me!”

“Okay, so that idea is shelved,” announced Pearl while Amethyst continued to pester Garnet about the lobstery future. “We could try and just have them live in the temple. But with an opal around, we’d need garnet and you here at all times to control them if they get rowdy.”

Rose nodded. “I thought so too. Having them live in or near the temple might just be what we need. But we need another gem to watch them and to help them survive on Earth.” Her gaze became shadowed. “And keep them away from the galaxy warp.”

“We also need to know more about the powers these gems possess. Like that fractured-looking one? Their power relates to heat somehow, but we haven’t seen any fire from her.”

“Him,” Rose gently corrected.

“Ugh, humans and their genders.” Pearl rolled her eyes. “What do we even call them? Hybrids?”

“Fossils!” All eyes turned to Amethyst-lobster, currently on top of Garnet’s square-fro. “Um,” she said, awkward to be the sudden center of attention. “The other amethyst mentioned them being called fossils before Pearl poofed her?”

Pearl and Garnet began to ask the little quartz more questions, but Rose didn’t hear them. All she could hear was a high-pitched ringing sound in her head as the world turned grey around her. “Fossils?” She asked, barely above a whisper. “You’re sure that’s the word she used?”

The other Crystal Gems immediately picked up on something being wrong, for Rose’s calm leader face had been replaced with dawning horror. “Um yeah. Is that… bad?”

Rose automatically turned to look at the bubbled hybrids again. Fossils. They were fossils! It had worked! Someone back on Homeworld had made it work! For a moment she almost felt excited, but the horror of the situation pushed the positive emotion down. “Fossilization is the process where organic structures are replaced with minerals. Typically it requires the organic to be dead, and only the bones fossilize.”

“Rose?” Pearl approached the taller, pinker gem, concerned.

Rose didn’t respond, she continued to think of all the things that had to have happened for fossils to be bubbled in front of her. “Pink Diamond wanted to see if it could be done to living humans. Turn humans into gems. She thought this was a compromise that would allow humans to continue on as sub-par gems.” Rose’s hand clenched. “She wanted to achieve this by feeding humans gem shards over generations.”

Pearl’s hand had almost touched Rose’s arm, but pulled back in horror at what Rose had said. The pastel gem stepped away from Rose, her face horrified.

Amethyst’s lobster jaw dropped into Garnet’s square-fro. Garnet’s mouth was agape at the shocking revelation.

“Pink Diamond never went ahead with her plan, we stopped her before she could even get the resources together to pitch the idea.” Rose Quartz, leader of the gem rebellion, turned and faced her remaining soldiers. “Which means that some gems on Homeworld liked the idea enough to go ahead with it.”

“That’s why they were capturing humans,” Pearl said, suddenly disgusted. “They wanted to make more fossils!”

“Well,” Amethyst said, desperately grasping for a solution, “well, maybe us blowing up their ship means that they won’t try again! Maybe they’ll leave Earth alone!”

“No,” Garnet said as she touched her glasses. “They’ll just come with smaller, quicker ships. They’ll take smaller amounts, so we won’t even know they’re here. They don’t even know _we’re_ still here, I bet.”

“As the guardians of this planet, and of humanity,” Rose said, resolute. “We have to stop them where we can. We also have to continue to hunt down and capture the corrupted gems.” However, the bitter reality of the situation made her sigh. “But we don’t have enough gems to watch _them_, and protect the Earth.” If there was even just _one more_ Crystal Gem around who could help them -- oh. Rose realized what the universe had cornered her into. “But I know where we can get at least one more.”

\--

ARE Y’ALL READY TO BE BACK IN BISMUTH?


	16. Chapter 16

**Chapter Sixteen: Sleeping spirit, awaken**

Rose returned to them with a bubbled gem. Pyramidal, rainbow-colored, borderline synthetic looking, Garnet and Pearl recognized it right away. Amethyst didn’t, and she felt dread from that fact.

“Bismuth?” Pearl asked, almost afraid. She bent down to look at the gem, then glanced fearfully up at Rose. “She’s…?”

“Not corrupted,” Rose said, and hid her eyes behind her curls. “She and I got into a fight. I bubbled her. And after that, there was so much to do…. I forgot about her.”

Pearl’s eyes went wide and she stepped back from Rose.

Amethyst watch Garnet’s Ruby hand clench so hard it shook. “You forgot?” The permafusion asked, as her tone swung wildly between rage and incomprehension. She was of two minds on the subject.

Rose nodded.

“One of the founding Crystal Gems, someone who could have been helping us this _whole time_, and you _forgot_ about her?!”

Rose nodded again.

Amethyst began to think she might have some future vision of her own, since her bad feeling had manifested almost immediately. “What did you fight about?” Amethyst’s question made Rose clench her hands, create tension on the pink bubble she held.

“Bismuth wanted to shatter the Diamonds,” Rose admitted. “I told her that wasn’t the path for us. At the time, I believed so strongly that we could win without shattering _anyone_.”

Garnet’s hands both shook with rage, though her face was impassive. Pearl’s shock with Rose had only grown until her eyes were wide as saucers, and her mouth covered by her hands.

Amethyst didn’t know how to feel. She’d never met the gem in the bubble before, but she knew Rose. Rose wasn’t the type to forget people, especially old friends, not even after a fight. She’d spent close to two years getting Amethyst to leave the Kindergarten. But the proof was right there -- staring her in the face. Rose had been perfect in Amethyst’s mind before, but after this her pink hair seemed duller, and her white dress slightly less pristine. Rose couldn’t even look them in the eye.

“Let her out,” Garnet said, her teeth gritted to hold in her constituent parts’ anger. “She’s been bubbled for thousands of years. And you have a lot of explaining to do to her.”

Rose nodded, and popped the bubble with a thought. The gem fell into her hands, and moments later began to glow.

It was time to meet Bismuth.

\--

Wearing socks and sandals was something Jet was going to need practice at. It was easy on the stone of his temporary home in the arena, harder on the snow-covered outer sections, and even harder when he warped down to the planet’s surface where there was mud. At least the place he’d warped to was warmer than the arena.

He floated around in his bubble, as the nearest warp pad wasn’t in a good spot -- in the middle of the wilderness. Jet wanted to meet some humans, see what they were like in the wild. He passed by rocky mountains and strange trees wildly different from those on the zoo or on Blue’s colony’s moon. Some of them had a peculiar pinkish fruit that sort of looked like a butt growing from them, which he grabbed. The taste was strange, they were softer than the fruit gems had produced for him, and positively overflowing with flavored water inside -- he almost got it all over his new clothes. In the middle was a strange rock that he couldn’t easily chew, so he threw it away.

Still, he gathered a bunch in bubbles and sent them away to his home. It was fruit, and he needed to eat it. He was going to be on Earth forever, he’d have to get used to Earth fruits. 

The first wild humans he found were a rambunctious band of males who were obviously dirty, dressed with incomplete pieces of armor and brandishing weapons that looked barely sharp enough to cut. They were gathered around a fire arguing in a language Jet didn’t understand as he floated along in his bubble.

One of them noticed Jet in his bubble and pointed it out to the others. Jet watched the wild humans talk to each other with interest until he saw one produce a bow and a quiver of arrows from a rucksack. Thankfully, Jet drifted away before the bow could be strung. Clearly he’d found an unruly group.

If they didn’t want to burst his bubble, he’d have shared some peaches with them -- perhaps they were hungry. That had been a bad feeling, hungry. Like he lost patience and gained meanness every time he felt the pain. Horrible.

Jet saw another new scene as he passed another mountain -- ponds that were set into terraces that went up the side of a mountain. There were evenly spaced plants in the ponds, and people were bent over pulling at them. As he watched, something occurred to him. The wild humans didn’t speak the same language as him -- that had never been a problem at the zoos, or among gems, but in the wild it would make interacting with them difficult.

He held his head in his hands as he processed how difficult this was going to be. Then, he felt a brush of air and looked up. An arrowhead had punched through the bubble, and was lodged in its membrane. That it hadn’t popped was a wonder in itself, so Jet poked at it to see how firmly lodged it was. This had two effects: one, pricked himself on the arrowhead and made his finger bleed, and two, the movement caused the bubble to burst. 

Gravity asserted itself shortly thereafter.

\--

Bismuth was _big_, Amethyst noticed first. She was almost as tall as Rose, but certainly wider. Broad-shouldered, muscular, grey as slate with rainbow hair, and her gem set in her chest as an innie. Her physical form had black boots, maroon pants, and a black apron with the Crystal Gem star on it. She even had the star on her arm -- like a human tattoo.

The first thing the new gem did when she was out was uppercut Rose, while everyone else was stunned.

“Oh!” Bismuth said when she saw she had an audience. “Um.” She looked at Rose, flat on her back but picking herself up, to the shocked gems in attendance, and back at her own fist. “I can explain.” She smiled and struck a pose like she was about to begin a lecture, or motivational speech, but said nothing. It was a long time before she dropped the act, by then Rose was already back up. “Yeah, I got nothing.”

“Bismuth,” Rose started, her cheek swollen but shrinking, “we need to talk.”

“You, uh, told them about our fight, huh?”

Garnet all but snarled her reply: “After she had no choice.”

Bismuth looked up, confused.

Amethyst didn’t like the situation. She shifted on her feet and tried not to look at Rose, or Garnet, or Bismuth. Everyone was mad at Rose, and Amethyst could see why. But -- the reason Bismuth had been put in the bubble in the first place was because of the fight. It was like a long time-out. Bismuth hadn’t suffered much, she’d just been on pause. That helped make it better, right?

Suddenly, Pearl was in Amethyst’s field of vision. “Amethyst, come on. Let’s get out you of here.”

“Hey,” the overcooked gem said, affronted. “I’m a Crystal Gem too.”

“Yes, but…. I’m worried that if you see this get much worse, it’ll take you ages to forgive us for what we have to say to Rose.” Pearl couldn’t meet Amethyst’s eyes, just like Rose couldn’t.

“If it’s something so bad that I’ll have to forgive you saying it, why are you going to say it?”

“Thousands of years?!” Bismuth suddenly shouted, as their conversation had gone on while Pearl tried to sequester Amethyst. “Well where is every… one.” Bismuth looked up, and suddenly saw the decorations in the Burning Room. Bubbles filled with gems, hundreds of them. Then she saw the fossils. “Humans?”

“Because this situation is… emotionally charged. I don’t want you to be angry at us, because we’re angry at Rose.” Pearl admitted, and used her superior height to nudge Amethyst through the door.

“B-but, Rose had a good reason, right?”

“Amethyst,” Rose said while the door opened. “There are some things that, even if you do them for a good reason, they’re still wrong. And people have a right to be angry at you for doing them. And you know I _didn’t_ have a good reason. I just forgot.”

Pearl pushed Amethyst out of the door and stood there while she waited to see if the little quartz would try to dart back in. She looked like she had been the one to bubble Bismuth, not Rose -- more regret and sorrow than Amethyst could see in Rose’s face with her eyes hidden.

Amethyst clenched her hands and darted off to the warp pad. With a thought, she was away.

\--

Jet fell through several of his own bubbles as he slowed down. It took him a while to realize the arrow had fallen with him, so it kept popping them as he made them appear below. He’d land, slow, then fall again. It went on like that until he lashed out at the arrow and sent it spinning away. He had just enough time to create another bubble to land on before he hit the ground.

As he processed how quickly his life could have been over, he looked around and saw that he was floating above one of the terraced ponds. The humans that had tended it were in the process of escape from Jet’s sudden arrival.

He burst the bubble and landed on the surface of the water. The plants were put there deliberately, so he didn’t want to damage them by disturbing their water. Pearl’s lessons in water-walking proved invaluable in that regard. Jet walked out of the pound and created black bubbles to walk up to the edge of the terrace like stairs. The fossil shaded his eyes so he could see further, in search of what had shot that arrow at him.

He got his answer when he noticed those wild humans from before surge out of the forest, sweaty and panting for air. They looked so exhausted, they could barely hold their weapons. Jet almost felt bad for them.

One pointed at him and shouted in their wild human language. The man brandished his rusty sword and took a step forward before he fell over.

That gave Jet an idea. “I don’t know what you guys are saying,” he said, “but I know I won’t be able to get much done if you keep chasing me.” He warmed up his throat and sang and held an easy note. After a few seconds the wild humans began to grow groggy and slump over onto the ground. When the last was asleep, Jet turned and walked in the direction the other wild humans had run. Maybe they’d be less inclined to run away if he just walked at them, instead of floating on a bubble?

Weirder stuff had happened.

\--

Amethyst stayed at the Kindergarten for a while until she felt like it had been long enough. When she came back to the Temple, she heard the sound of trees toppling over, and immediately thought a monster attack was in progress. She took the shape of an owl and quickly flew to the source of the trees falling -- the hill on the back of the Temple mountain. Half the trees that had been there were cleared, their stumps even gone. Rather than a monster, she saw Bismuth at work, one hand morphed into a sawblade which she used to carve into the tree trunks for an unknown purpose.

The purple owl landed on a pile of uncut logs near Bismuth and watched her work. The burly gem had a defeatd look on her face -- like she wasn’t really in the moment. Like she just left her body to work on the last assignment she had given it, while her mind was elsewhere.

“So, uh,” Amethyst-owl said and coughed into her wing. “How did it go?”

“About as well as could be expected,” Bismutth muttered with minimal energy. “I screamed at Rose, Garnet screamed at Rose, Pearl screamed at me, I screamed at Pearl, Garnet screamed at Pearl for screaming at me, Rose just _stood there_ and let it _happen_.” At the end, a bit of energy came back to Bismuth as she aggressively sawed the log into length-wise sections. There were small patches of liquid around her eyes, but she didn’t cry just yet. “Safe to say, it’ll be awkward for a while.”

Amethyst looked at the ground, and tried to make her owlself even smaller. “Yeah. So… what are you doing with the trees?”

“Makin’ lumber. Going to be building a house so I can watch those…,” she unmorphed her hand and held it over her face. “I forgot what they were called. The human-things, the reason Rose unbubbled me.”

“Fossils.”

“That, thanks.” Bismuth’s work resumed, her expression still vacant. “It’s the only thing I’m good for now, might as well get to it.”

Amethyst found her attempts to grow smaller double. “I’m sorry.”

“Not you who did it.”

“Yeah, but… I get the feeling Rose didn’t apologize for it.”

Bismuth’s work stopped once more, and her attention was focused solely on Amethyst.

Suddenly with Bismuth’s complete attention, Amethyst struggled to articulate her words. “I mean like. I know she’s sorry she had to do it, Pearl always matches her when she’s like that. But… Rose doesn’t apologize for doing things. She apologizes that what she did hurt your feelings, or got you hurt, but not that she did it. If she’s not gonna, I will, cause someone has to.”

A bit of life returned to Bismuth’s expression. “Thanks. I needed that. So, wanna help me build a house?”

“Sure, I have some spare junk I can get you to give you an idea what humans like!”

\--


End file.
